Royal Treatment by Royal Canin
Type of work: Service Design
Duration: 2 months
Designers: Nicole Prasetia, Toh Kai Yan, Kamilia Azzara, Chaneparambil Sanaya, Nurul Asyiqin Bte Mohd Ariffin
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Project Overview:
Royal Treatment by Royal Canin is the result of a collaborative project where we were given a task to enhance a chosen brand through a service. Our team chooses Royal Canin, a pet food brand that values science and nutrition above all. In this project, I mainly played a role in research, Ideation, and structuring.
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With our first insight, we discovered many pawrents (pet parents) struggle with understanding their pet's wants and needs. This is a sentiment shared by vets claiming some information provided by pawrents was not accurate to the pet's actual condition. Looking at the global trend of pet humanization, pawrents are starting to demand a rise in the standards of pet care to give their companions the best life they can but according to research human living spaces are getting smaller and working hours are getting longer. This alludes to the need for convenience within the process while maintaining quality pet care.
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In response to this, we created a pet home health care system and a Royal Canin center which doubles as a recreational center for community meet-ups, and other Royal Canin services.
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Research: Getting to know Royal Canin
To me, getting to know the brand itself plays a vital role in starting strong on a project. With this research, our goal was to determine Royal Canin's position in the market, it's UPS, and it's values as a brand. To do this we analyzed their history, the countries they are active in, and their operations. Through this process, we found Royal Canin's obsession with nutrition and 'health' and how that translates into their operation which we then used as inspiration when designing the service.
Research: Getting to know the players
After getting to know the brand, we set out to research possible issues/pain points within the market. We made sure to cover as many angles as possible such as going to pet community gatherings, interviewing vets and Royal Canin ambassadors, and conducting a survey with pet owners.
One of the difficulties we faced was trying to filter relevant information, and to tackle this we asked focused questions amongst ourselves like what is the common link between all these situations, is there a link between the rise of pet ownership and a rise in online misinformation, how can Royal Canin insert themselves in this narrative to achieve a positive outcome.
Problem Identification
In order to turn data into insights, we analyzed and found common threads between each category of research such as 'pet owners usually use the internet as a primary source when learning how to care for their pets' and vet accounts of 'usually there's a lot of misinformation online'.
This information however was just a piece of the puzzle. Digging deeper we found pet owners rarely take their pets to the vet, and owners not being able to identify their pets wants and needs soon enough. We identified all these problems but the question remains of why? what is preventing owners from providing the best possible care they can to their pets' when we know from trend research that they really want to? This line of questioning is what enabled us to gain an understanding of the users and filtered everything down to 5 pain points which were then categorized in a problem statement.
Approach
What we did here was to analyze the 5 pain points and create categorizations of an approach to guide our solutions in an enhancement-based framework. The construction of this framework guided us to answers on what was actually needed in order for 'pawrents' to provide the best possible care for pets. To further our outcome we analyzed the objectives further and synthesized them into steps that we could take in the service which became the structure of our entire service.
Outcome
Final Remarks
Overall, the success of this project was a result of a diverse collaborative environment within the group as well as excellent chemistry where ideas were constantly built on top of each other. We often found ourselves in situations where we learned concepts from each other's domains such as how I learned to design original and understandable diagrams from my colleague in graphic communication. We also developed empathy for each others work requirements which allowed us to develop efficiency in completing tasks together. Furthermore, creating restrictions right at the start of the project gave us the opportunity to dig deeper into the topic itself and allowed us to explore more unique perspectives within pet care.
Exhibition
NAFA Window display - Open House 2023
NAFA exhibition - Sur-vis de-zine 2022