Background
Just Russel is a D2C pet nutrition brand and one of the fastest growing companies in Europe. They build personalized meal plans for cats and dogs and deliver high quality food to your door.
Their original offering was built around dry food, but many pet owners prefer to mix dry with wet or fresh. Just Russel introduced a Mixed plan to address this need, and wanted to test it properly before pushing it across Europe - so they used Motives to get the breadth and depth they needed to move forward.
What they tested
Four markets: France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany. Dog owners and cat owners, recruited across dry, wet and mixed feeders.
Each participant did a 60-minute interview with the Motives AI Moderator, thinking aloud in their own language, working through stimuli localised into French, Dutch and German.
The interview covered a number of key decision areas:
- whether people understood the new personalised plan and the Mixed plan with no one there to explain them
- which trust and credibility signals mattered for a health-adjacent recommendation
- how pricing was read, and where willingness to pay ran out
- which brands people put Just Russel next to
Why it works
Motives can recruit the right participants internationally, and interview them in their local language - 60 interviews across 4 markets were run in just 5 days.
The Motives analysis pulled out insights for the Just Russel team, both for each market individually and also drawing comparisons across the markets. The AI assistant allowed the wider Just Russel team to dig deeper into the results for their own areas of interest.
The results touched on key topics on clarity, credibility and pricing, and gave the team a number of changes to implement for their launch. Hearing the results straight from consumers, with video snippets for every insight, made it easy for the team to align on the important learnings.
