Bluebird Botanicals
Bluebird Botanicals is a top three national CBD retailer. They hired Illustria to create a more authentic and scalable brand in a market that is poised to grow to $20 Billion by 2024. Our rebrand led to a 200% immediate increase in revenue, allowing them to make back their investment within 24+ hours. Within a week, Bluebird made 4.6x the investment back.
My Role: UX Research | Brand Strategy | Brand Messaging
Overview
Their Challenge
Bluebird came to us with a number of challenges. They were struggling with lead generation, facing scaling challenges due to their growing demand, and their customers had a hard time reading their product labels.
The Solution
The new Bluebird Botanicals brand accurately reflects their inherently fun, quirky, and deeply compassionate qualities. We designed a clear and sophisticated system that spoke to their market leadership and could accommodate ongoing expansions in their product lines. The rebrand and redesigned labels vastly improved the customer experience, resulting in record sales and explosive customer feedback.
Bluebird’s new and unique brand allows them to stand out in an increasingly overcrowded market space.
The Audience
Bluebird’s audience was made up of the two segments, wholesale and direct consumers, both with their unique ways of interacting with the brand.
B2B Audience
Brokers
Retailers
B2C Audience
In-store consumers
Online consumers
Process
Research
Strategy
Messaging
Branding & Identity
Visual Design
Research
Client Goals & Desired Outcome
To successfully scale Bluebird Botanicals to the mainstream market, we worked with the client to identify the following pain points and goals:
Customers had been complaining about the product label design being confusing
They had an incomplete understanding of their audiences
The original messaging and design did not accurately convey their brand
They lacked a cohesive and clear brand story
Understanding the Business Context
My team and I spent a full day onsite conducting a Discovery session with the CEO, CMO and select employees at the company. We interviewed them in both group and 1-1 settings to understand the past, present, and future context of the business. This laid the foundation upon which to develop KPIs and measure our research, customer insights, analyses, and successes against.
User Research
To understand customer behavior at scale, I conducted quantitative and qualitative research by reviewing Bluebird’s existing data and deploying a mass survey online.
Quantitative Research
To begin, I reviewed Bluebird’s Google Analytics data and their sales order data. I also deployed a mass online survey.
Google Analytics
Reviewed data from June 1st, 2017 to July 12th, 2018
>500,000 users
Key Dimensions: Age, Gender, Device, Transactions, etc.
Sales data
Reviewed data from July 2017 through July 2018
Order Frequency, Ordering Trends, Spending Habits, Key Markets
Conducted mass survey online to discover new potential audiences
1,028 participants
Ages: 18-100
Location: United States
Qualitative Research
I also conducted 1-1 interviews via phone calls with their B2B and B2C audiences to understand their mental models in-depth in regards to Bluebird’s brand and products.
Existing audiences
3 Customer Care Representatives (internal)
4 B2B wholesalers
11 current customers
New potential audience research
3 Potential customers (target)
Quantitative User Research Results
80%
of users use a mobile device to visit Bluebird, but have the lowest conversion rate
46%
Of users visit Bluebird’s site via desktop and has the highest e-commerce conversion rates
35%
Of customers purchase again within 6 months
38%
Increase in spending from repeat customers on their second order
25-34 year olds
Make up the largest portion of revenue and are the largest user group (out of six)
65+ year olds
Make up the second-lowest amount of revenue and are the second lowest user group, but have the highest e-commerce conversion rate
Qualitative User Research Results
My qualitative research uncovered important insights that the quantitative data did not reveal.
Greater opportunity amongst pet owners
6 out of 11 interviewees regularly purchased CBD for their pets. However, they all said that they would just buy the non-pet labeled products as these were the only ones offered in bulk and because it was exactly the same, skewing the e-commerce data and analysis.
Not actually price sensitive
Despite participants saying they wished Bluebird would lower their prices, the data showed strong user loyalty due to their preference for the product’s higher quality and efficacy.
Consider themselves health-conscious
Users largely talked about CBD in relation to their health rather than as an alternative to cannabis, which was their previous strategy, or as a product to pamper themselves.
Strategy
Target Audience Analysis
Through my user research, I created an extensive analysis report segmenting Bluebird’s audience into specific profiles, outlining their behavior, motivators, and needs.
Brokers
Expect high-touch service from manufacturers
1-1 phone calls
Seminars
Need educational resources
Samples are highly valuable
Retailers
Hesitant to bring in additional CBD products as shelves are crowded
Expect to be equipped with the information in order to educate their customers and answer questions
Extremely protective of their stores’ reputation
Consumers
Often coming into stores having done their research and know what they’re looking for
Stores have many products and shelves are crowded
Usually encounter analysis paralysis
In conclusion, I learned that Bluebird’s users were not receiving an overall cohesive experience due to a lack of consistency in messaging across their digital and in-store touchpoints.
Messaging
Defining the audience and understanding what they care about is a critical step. It lays the foundation for the brand messaging and influences the brand position. After analyzing the user research, I began wrote the brand messaging for Bluebird.
Some select pages below.
Main Brand Attributes
Overarching Value Proposition
Brand Promise
Value Proposition For Brokers
Value Proposition For Retailers
Supporting Value Propositions
Branding & Identity
Once the brand messaging was finalized, our team used this as the foundation to design Bluebird’s identity.
Mood Boarding
I worked with the Creative Director to lead collaborative mood boarding sessions with the client. This ensured that we developed a common language and approached the brand and products from the same mental model.
The individuals at Bluebird are passionate, caring, personable, hardworking, and more than a little quirky. However, none of this came through in their brand.
Before
After
Users had also complained about their confusing labels. With the rebrand, we designed a clear and sophisticated system that vastly improved the customer experience, resulting in record sales and explosive customer feedback.
Before
Before
After
After
Visual Design
The new design system allows their product lines to expand while continuously enhancing the customer experience.
The brand launch also resulted in explosive positive feedback from customers and record sales.
Customer love on Instagram
Customer love on billboard ad
Direct Sales Results
200% immediate increase in revenue
100% of the investment made back in a little over 24 hours
4.6x the investment made back within the first week
16% increase in new users
40.5% increase in average likes on Instagram posts
118% increase in average number of comments on Instagram posts