How we applied consumer “Growth Levers” to a contact lens manufacturer in the USA

For questions about this case study contact Mick Hedberg. For extended case study, click here to view PDF.

The contact lens industry has a complex and dynamic market structure involving multiple stakeholders and channels, often coupled with poor or conflicting data. Claimed data could not accurately reflect this complex market structure, and we needed to create economically correct summaries that explained brand performance as well as a shared mental model for teams that would allow for both recognition of local differences and identification of commonalities.

Our objective was to reconcile the various ‘sources of truth’ from across the business and generate a unified perspective on the vision care market.

• Define the playing field through creation of a wearer map: a segmentation and visualization of consumers relative to their current, past or future potential use of contact lenses.
• Quantify the consumer pathways and switching behavior occurring over time between these segments.
• Identify the highest leverage point pathways to activate in the future to achieve growth and determine where to play.

• 40% of all category entrants in the past year were consumers who had previously lapsed from contact lenses. The Japan business team leveraged these insights to build their strategic business plan on ‘restarts’ as their key target audience for future growth.
• 1 in 4 new wearers exit in the first year. The path to purchase is painful, and there is an opportunity to fix some of this “leaky bucket” through improved patient follow-ups from the doctors’ practices.
• The category has significant headroom to grow across all markets. The model uncovered that non-considerers were more than 2 times the size of the considerers – which provided the foundations for a whole new advertising campaign in the USA.