Rebranding 'Smash': Module 2

Module 2 seen us propose a rebrand  for a popular dehydrated potato product Smash. The project was done in groups again and we were asked to use interview tools from semester one to gather information on the product. We started  to gather information on the university campus. One of my teammates had set questions to ask the interviwees ranging from- 'what was your favourite childhood meal?' to 'would you ever consider buying smash?' We interviewed roughly six groups of people in a half hour period and noticed that almost all of them were students between the ages of 18-25. For this reason we decided we had to look at a broader range of people within Smashes target market and interview elsewhere. We took our investigation into town an targeted older people who we thought may have tried the product. The people we asked said they had tried smash in an era were ready meals, fast food and instant snack food had become more available and cheaper than fresh produce. slightly of track i know, but, I went to see the comedian Sean Lock last year. One of his jokes was about the kind of rubbish he ate as he was growing up in the seventies. He joked that he lived off a strict diet of mince and orange squash. So he always ran around hyper fuelled by the e numbers in his squash for the first ten years of his life. I kind of got this image from the older people i asked- 'oh.. smash used to taste so much better in the old days; probably because of all the crap it was made with'. Sean Lock was right then. 

So after we'd asked another 15 groups of people in town I headed home and made up my sachet of smash then abruptly binned it; a horrible gloopy mess i did not enjoy eating. I still persisted after lunch and we sat down to discuss the kind of people who were intrested in the product. We had to create model personas; a kind of persona that summarised the kind of people we had interviewed. We made three personas. we felt our best one was based on a woman called 'Brenda' she was retired and used smash as an ingredient for other recipes and occasionally as a side for main meals. we couldn't really see, from the information we'd gathered, smash being a product you'd buy solely to eat on it own.