Innovation in Home Care for the BoP

Client

  • Unilever

Sector

  • FMCG

Services

  • Ethnography
  • Product & Service Solutions

Between 2011 and 2012, Unilever partnered with Quicksand to address a pressing product inquiry: how low-income households across geographies in India, Nigeria, China, Indonesia, and South Africa manage home hygiene. Using design research and co-creation approaches, the team sought to understand the everyday needs of consumers, specifically during home cleaning processes like surface cleaning, dish washing, and toilet cleaning. With these on-ground learnings, the team was able to bring socio-cultural contexts into concept and product development. The approach was grounded in the belief that it is not enough to simply produce cheaper everyday products, but to understand how cultural contexts shape everyday needs and practices.

The four distinct projects were underpinned by foundational research aimed at building a deep understanding of consumers using ground-up research that explored everyday routines, time-saving behaviours, and perceptions of values such as cleanliness and frugality. We worked in partnership with Quantum, a quantitative research agency in India and CIA, a South Africa based market research firm.

Context

Unilever’s Household Care vertical identified product innovation opportunities by shifting focus to an often-overlooked segment: non-users at the base of the pyramid. A central focus of the study was to foster change in rural consumers’ increased reliance on proxy dishwashing items such as ash, laundry powder, or lemon, rather than a specialised cleaning product. To inform this, the team mapped daily household cleaning routines across diverse contexts, uncovering patterns and behaviours that revealed opportunities for more relevant and meaningful product innovation.

Based on Unilever’s internal research, it was found that their existing range of home hygiene products were not addressing the specific needs of low-income households in these geographies, particularly because of different cooking practices and utensils, the nature of dirt and grime, and the textures and materials of household surfaces. These four projects were anchored around three core principles:

  • Identify unvoiced and unsolved problems faced by homemakers in daily cleaning and dishwashing.
  • Devise product and packaging solutions that solve these challenges while enhancing women’s self-esteem and aspirations and ease up their daily routines.
  • Develop sustainable business models to ensure last-mile access and adoption.

To address these challenges, Quicksand developed a methodology centered on understanding consumers within their own environments.

Home as a Space of Inquiry

The team looked at participants' homes as research sites, studying non-users' daily cleaning routines rather than mapping existing user journeys. This shift revealed how physical spaces and cultural contexts shaped cleaning behaviors differently across geographic and socio-economic segments.

Tactile materials were used as conversational probes to encourage participants to explain what cleanliness meant to them within their own living environments. This home-centered approach uncovered insights rooted in spatial arrangements and cultural habits, rather than specific product specifications.

Co-Creation Workshops and Research Artefacts

Building on these consumer ethnographies, the team facilitated co-creation workshops to translate user insights into testable product concepts. These workshops brought together product designers, packaging specialists, and local ethnographers after each research phase to ideate new directions for product development. This included experts in rural product development who understood both user constraints and building at scale. Using the Double Diamond design thinking process, domain experts systematically explored new possibilities while anchoring them in real household practices.

Workshop Toolkit

The research findings were transformed into a range of artefacts. Product prototypes built with powders and liquids were placed in people’s homes to capture contextual feedback. Documentation outputs included user journey maps, visual stories, and films capturing household cleaning practices. One notable example was a photobook documenting smells of Bangalore, which informed the development of toilet-cleaning products. These artifacts served dual purposes of helping Unilever teams visualize consumer realities as well as providing shared reference points for cross-disciplinary collaboration between research and product development.

These projects showed how geographical and cultural nuances can be integral in product development for underserved communities. Quicksand's prior experience in development projects (such as community sanitation initiatives) deepened understanding around base-of-the-pyramid households, thus bringing a unique perspective to commercial product development briefs. By situating home hygiene within cultural contexts and daily practices, this partnership established a framework to develop products that resonated with users' actual needs. Ultimately, such collaborations show how ethnographic insights can inform commercial innovation by creating products grounded in everyday realities.

Resources