As food trends shift from convenience to sustainability to health, we’ve been on the edge of the transformation. Along with our clients, we sought to understand where the trends were headed next. What are the hopes, dreams, passions, pain points, lifestyle, favorite brands and media behaviors of consumers? What drives food choices, and how do we uncover what people are thinking about food?

We’ve attended tours, chats and classes for millennial bakers. We’ve conducted ethnographic interviews in Southern homes. We’ve moderated online networks about breakfast. And our team has planned guided trend trips in markets across the U.S. exploring desserts and the indulgence category.

From granola to yogurt to snacks and soda, we’ve immersed ourselves in more than 50 categories of food, condiments and beverages. And through all this we’ve been able to explore consumers’ values and how they affect food preferences, keeping in mind personal choices, familial needs and culture.

Insights have been used to guide product development, determine messaging and establish preferred modes of engagement that foster brand growth and loyalty.

To develop loyalty programs for skin care products, brands must first understand the emotional drivers of loyalty and consumers’ motivations and needs related to loyalty programs. Why does one choose a certain program over another? What is out there that works well for consumers? How do programs make people feel? And what visual components make a program seem desirable?

Holding one-on-one interviews and focus groups in Taipei, Taiwan, we asked consumers to describe their favorite existing loyalty programs, create the ideal loyalty program, complete several emote exercises and provide feedback on verbal and visual stimuli. Participants also focused on describing their journey with their current cosmetic brand.

Diving deep into consumers’ emotions regarding loyalty, we gained insight into the current emotional drivers of loyalty as well as those that have the most potential to drive loyalty in the future. Estée Lauder used this research to develop loyalty program offerings for La Mer that generate greater emotional connections with consumers, garner brand allegiance, and inform current marketing and messaging tactics.

In the retirement-planning landscape, Generation Xers and Millennials are beginning to save for their golden years as Boomers settle into retirement. To make investing easy for these younger generations, many financial companies are offering target-date funds. But what if your retirement timeline isn’t the same as your peers? Or you’d prefer to be more aggressive than most? To create a truly tailored approach for individuals, Federated Investors – in partnership with retirement specialist Ann Schleck & Co – created a program that educates advisors on how to pitch and build custom target-date funds for their clients. Fusion Hill was engaged to build the program brand and the suite of creative materials.

Our team developed several campaign concepts — all with the goal of communicating this complex product and its benefits in a simple and effective manner. While the more readily available target-date funds appeal to groups of participants who have similar retirement goals, this new approach allows for customization at the individual level. The chosen theme, “No Two Alike,” conveys that differentiator clearly. We applied it to a program-in-a-box with both advisor and plan sponsor-facing materials.

These value-add materials have had immediate and tremendous success with advisors and were granted the 2016 Signature Award from the Plan Sponsor Council of America.