A consumer opens a campaign and feels understood — because six months earlier a segmentation study said who she was, an equity tracker said where the brand was losing her, and the creative platform was written from both. This is the full chain, end to end, as I ran it at Pronaca: research, measurement, creative, one argument.
Research sits with insights. Equity sits with brand. Creative sits with the agency. Each one produces a deck, the decks never touch, and the campaign ends up being whoever argued best in the room. My job was to make the three fit into one sentence.
A segmentation study built on attitudes to life and to food — not on age brackets. Six typologies with real sizes.
Research supplierAnnual brand equity tracking across seven categories: awareness, funnel, brand power, image attributes.
Kantar · Dec 2023 · 400 CAWIA strategic platform: problem, human truth, brand truth, strategy — then territories, archetype and tone.
Agency · March 2024The study segmented by attitude rather than demographics, on two axes: how much choice a household actually has, and whether it leans to tradition or to change. Demographics tell you who can afford the product. Attitudes tell you what the product means.
Bubble size is segment size. Positions follow the study's perceptual map; the axes are its own — choice against restriction, tradition against change.
Traditional, religious, family-first. Food is how you take care of people. A hard life, fought through, with cooking as the proof of love.
Buys: corner shops and markets. Unbranded chicken.
Defined more by what they are not. Sceptical, indifferent to food, buy on lowest price. Heavy internet and social media use.
Says: "I just want something quick and easy, whatever's there."
Follow trends, chase quality, treat health as a maxim. The most sporting segment. Nutritional value beats price.
Buys: supermarkets, whole chicken, our brands.
A new lower-middle class holding conservative values tightly while reaching for trends, to mark a difference.
Tension: wants to belong to two worlds at once.
Modern, open, sociable, fluent with technology, but still holding family values. Trade healthy eating for flavour and variety without guilt.
Says: "I love eating well and trying new things."
Not trying to stand out. Conservative, conformist, loyal to traditional food — in a quantity that satisfies.
Value: enough, familiar, reliable.
The commercially useful finding is the shape, not the labels. Nearly half the market — Cariñosas plus Comelones — sits on the tradition side, and the largest single group shops in corner stores and buys unbranded chicken. That is a brand's biggest audience and its weakest distribution, in the same sentence. A media plan built for Urbanos because Urbanos are more fun to talk about would have missed 30% of the country.
The equity tracker runs the Meaningful / Different / Salient framework across seven categories. For the sauces brand it produced the most useful kind of bad news: a funnel that is perfect at the top and leaks all the way down.
Brand funnel, 2023 tracking. Total awareness and near-total trial, then a collapse: 94% have tried it, 36% buy it often. A rival with lower trial converts far better into habit. No amount of reach fixes this — the problem is downstream of awareness.
brand power share, 2021 to 2023. Slow, steady, and invisible in any single quarter
brands recalled spontaneously, unchanged across three years — the category is not getting more competitive in memory, only on shelf
On the importance-versus-performance map, the attribute that matters most is the one performing worst.
Respected as traditional. Not felt as close. The same diagnosis the parent brand carried.
Here is where the layers stop being research and start being a brief. The segmentation says the biggest audience cooks as an act of care, under real economic restriction. The equity tracker says the brand is known by everyone, trusted less than it should be, and losing the habit.
A brand that everybody has tried and fewer keep buying does not have an awareness problem. It has a reason-to-return problem — and in this category the reason has to be felt, not explained.
That sentence is what went to the agency. Not a data dump, not a mood board: the business problem stated in a way a creative team can actually answer.
The agency framework, and the reason I keep pointing at it: every step is forced to earn the next one. You cannot get to a tagline without having stated a human truth, and you cannot state a human truth that the segmentation does not support.
Silent innovation, diluted positioning, a brand perceived as traditional, and communication that was tactical and low-reach. Straight out of the equity tracker.
"Even though the competition invites you to explore the world of recipes — mid-week, cooking is not always a pleasure." Which is the segmentation's largest group, described honestly instead of flatteringly.
The portfolio itself: 20+ sauce varieties. Not a claim, an inventory. The one asset the competition could not copy that quarter.
Move the territory from imagination to versatility. Archetype: the Creator, with shades of Hero. Tone: empathetic, inviting, never arrogant — a brand that has just been questioned on quality does not get to be smug.
Territories are not executions. They are the arguments a brand could credibly make — presented together so the decision is made on strategy, before anybody falls in love with a film.
"With Gustadina, good gets better."
The special touch that improves the dish. Positions the brand as the upgrade to something the cook already made — it credits the person, not the product.
#GustadinaConTodo"A variety worth the taste."
The full portfolio as the message, plus the naming play the brand name itself allows. This is the brand truth turned into a line.
#MeGustaGustadina"When you need us, we're here."
Commitment and everyday effort. The territory closest to the Cariñosas segment — care, reliability, presence, no spectacle.
#DíaDíaConGustadinaThe platform put a refresh of the packaging before the advertising, on purpose. A brand carrying a quality gap that answers with a campaign is a brand that has decided to look different rather than be different — and consumers price that correctly within one purchase cycle. First the product and the proof; then the media.
Mid-way through this work, a regulatory story about the sauces category hit the news. The instinct in the room is always the same — pull everything, apologise everywhere, assume the worst. We ran the study first.
consumers had heard the news. Reach of the problem: total.
intended to stop buying. Damage: real, and far smaller than feared.
would keep purchasing the brand. The equity built over years did its job.
Both brand pillars survived the episode; only the perception of variety dipped.
The gap between "eight in ten heard it" and "twelve in a hundred will act on it" is the whole argument for tracking equity in peacetime. Without a baseline, that first number is the only one anybody has, and it buys a panic-sized budget. With a baseline, it buys a proportionate response — explain, show the quality evidence, and get back to building the thing that made 60% stay.
Marketing arguments usually collapse into two camps: the people with the numbers and the people with the ideas, each convinced the other is the problem. This case is the answer I believe in — the segmentation earned the insight, the insight earned the territory, and the territory earned the film. Every step traceable backwards to a person in a real kitchen with a real budget.
That is also what I ask of a marketing team. Not that they choose between data and creative, but that they refuse to accept an idea that cannot say which number it came from — and refuse to accept a number that never becomes an idea.
Segmentation and equity tracking written into the creative platform.
The same tracker measures what the creative did.
Three suppliers, one chain, one decision.