Play-doh: Experience Map

Play-doh came to us with a very big challenge: to come up with big digital, social and experiential ideas to promote their products but also change the brand perception from being a traditional kid toy company to one of the leaders in STEM education. To do so, we had to do extensive research on moms and identify their parenting style, learn about their child's education and back to school rituals.

My role was to lead the user research and strategy by identifying the right methodologies that will help us come up with innovative ideas. Some of the artifacts that we created were interview scripts, surveys, personas and experience maps.

Challenge

How might we design a brand experience that promotes Play-doh products as leaders in STEM education? 

Discover and Define

• We did desk research about parenting styles and parent's purchasing behaviors but also competitive analysis of othe products, services, campaigns to identify strengths, weaknesses, threats and opportunities for our brand
• We wrote research scripts, conducted interviews and designed surveys targeted to mom and dads that belong to our demographic
• We analyzed patterns of behavior, came up with some observations that helped us identify insights
• Research helped us design personas and experience maps

Experience Map

We are mapping a year in a life of a millennial mom by describing her actions and feeling to determine opportunities within the key moments of the journey

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Concepts

With our overall messaging in mind which was "open a can of imagination" we identified the moments in the journey where we want to activate her and came up with the following ideas

Little minds, big ideas

A program where kids build a real size car made out of Play-doh in collaboration with Volve Wagen. Kids and Engineers work together to make this vision a reality. The making of the car will be documented through a short form video shared on YouTube and an online platform will showcase the prototype of the car, the making of it and testimonials of kids and engineers.

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Create your world

We will create an app where kids and moms will be able to browse short video form stories and choose to alter them by adding Play-doh characters that will be stored in gallery of images. A website will house all the videos created by the participants and share them on social media.

Play-Doh LAB

We will create physical and digital labs where kids, moms, dads and DIY'ers come together to play and learn. We will design a pop up store in Soho where we will invite innovators, teachers, designers and engineers to teach short courses in physical computing, 3d printing and modeling, We’ll document and share kids learnings and creations across social media, followed by smaller pieces of instructional content that will inspire moms at home with ideas. Videos and Images will be released weekly to show parents and teachers how they can use Play-Doh to teaches kids about letters, numbers,geography, colors, shapes, math and more.

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