How a global spices brand found an ownable positioning with AI-led consumer intelligence

The challenge: the right insight is the biggest lever on advertising ROI

Two campaigns with the same budget can deliver very different returns. The difference is rarely the media plan. It is whether the message is built on a real consumer insight.

Finding that insight through traditional research has five known problems:

• Expensive. Primary studies consume budget before a single ad runs.
• Slow. Months pass between brief and insight.
• The say-do gap. Consumers claim one thing in surveys and do another in real life.
• Fragmented. Multiple agencies and siloed data cause misalignment and delay.
• Blind spots. Hidden tensions and unspoken needs stay buried.

The brief was to own a territory that was defensible and emotionally resonant. That meant answering six questions: what consumers really want from daily cooking, which territory is unclaimed, where the brand has the right to win, who the consumer is, what single truth the positioning rests on, and how the brand should look and feel.

What we did: a six-phase AI-led workflow

Phase 1: Decode consumer intent

We harvested the language people actually type into Google, Amazon and Reddit, sized each need with SEMrush search volumes, and de-duplicated it into one working set of more than 8,000 keywords.

NLP embeddings grouped the keywords by underlying intent. A large language model named the emotional job-to-be-done behind each cluster, and strategists reviewed the clusters to set six category motivations.

Phase 2: Map demand and whitespace

• Healthy without compromise. Indulgent and healthy are no longer opposites. People want both at once.
• Outsource the decision. Decision fatigue turns cooking into a question: “What should I cook tonight?”
• Ambition beyond skill. Appetite for global cuisines now outruns the skill and ingredients to cook them.

Where real demand met thin competition, four strategic territories emerged: restaurant-style cooking, everyday flavour upgrades, global democratisation, and easy, guided cooking.

Phase 3: Find ownable territory

• Authenticity vs convenience. The category was busy at the edges and open in the middle. That middle, “Easy Gourmet”, combines credible global flavour with everyday convenience, and the brand can own it.
• Competitor positioning. Plotting brands on explore vs nostalgia and indulgence vs healthy showed the explore and healthy corner is thinly held.
• Demographic and audience. Mapping generation against gender lean showed the brand could bridge Millennial and Gen X audiences across both genders, a span few competitors credibly hold.

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   Phase 4: Build consumer personas

   AI turned scattered market research profiles into three decision-ready personas: the confident everyday cook, the curious flavour explorer and the time-poor provider.

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   Phase 5: Develop the strategic concept

   Using the 12 brand archetypes framework (Margaret Mark and Carol S. Pearson), the first recommendation, Explorer + Lover, was refined to Magician + Explorer: transformation through discovery.

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   Phase 6: Visualise and activate

   Strategy was brought to life through creative assets, with two concept routes built on the Magician + Explorer archetype.

What the work delivered