The Consumer Packaged Goods industry is at a crossroads. With shifting lifestyles, rising consumer expectations, and saturation in many categories, it’s no longer enough to rely on past purchase data or generic trends. CPG brands need to go deeper. They need empathy – the kind that only comes from seeing how people live, shop, and use products in real time. That’s where Empathy Treks come in.

Empathy Treks: immersive, in-person research journeys that help uncover unspoken consumer needs and emotional motivations. They create a vivid picture of the real consumer experience – one that’s hard to understand from behind a desk or screen.

Why now?

The world has changed, and so have consumer routines. Hybrid work, changing household structures, and increasing focus on health and sustainability mean people are interacting with products differently than they did just a few years ago. Traditional surveys may capture some of this, but they often miss the deeper context. Empathy Treks allow brands to fill in those gaps and respond with smarter, more human-centered innovations.

Four key drivers of this need in 2025:

• Behavioral shifts post-pandemic: More meals at home, increased use of pantry staples, and changing hygiene routines have redefined product usage, especially in kitchens and bathrooms.
• Increased product competition: With private label brands ramping up and category lines blurring, understanding the "why" behind consumer preference is more important than ever.
• Consumer demand for authenticity: Shoppers want brands to be real and relatable. Empathy-driven insights help brands connect in meaningful, authentic ways.
• The limits of tech-only tools: While data analytics and AI reveal the ‘what,’ they often fall short on the ‘why.’ In-home visits complement these tools by adding emotion, intention, and lived experience.

At a time when every product innovation or marketing message needs to hit the mark, understanding the consumer journey at home can be a game-changer. Within a single Empathy Trek, a team might observe how a busy parent repurposes snack-size products for lunchboxes, or how a senior adapts packaging due to limited dexterity. These are the nuanced, real-world use cases that transform strategy and drive growth.

By making room for in-home, qualitative research in their learning plans, CPG teams position themselves to make smarter, more empathetic decisions across strategy, product design, and innovation.

Surveys tell you what consumers think they do. In-home visits show you what they actually do. That simple shift—from asking to observing—can reveal invaluable insights often missed by other research methods. For CPG brands, these home visits expose the nitty-gritty truths behind usage, storage, routines, and workarounds, offering a more accurate snapshot of consumer behavior.

The power of ethnographic research in the home

Ethnographic-style research invites us into a consumer’s environment, allowing researchers to be a fly on the wall. Whether it’s watching someone prep breakfast, unpack groceries, or organize under their sink, what’s uncovered goes beyond words. It dives into the emotional and behavioral drivers that influence everyday choices. These lived interactions form the foundation of empathy treks and are vital to understanding the complete consumer journey.

Examples of what you learn from home visits

Many insights are only possible when viewed within the context of the home:

• Product workarounds: Consumers often customize products to suit their needs – tearing open packaging differently, combining products, or transferring contents into other containers.
• Storage reveals priorities: The placement of a product (back of pantry vs. countertop) indicates frequency of use and perceived value.
• Unstated habits: People rarely mention routines that feel "normal" to them, like how they rinse produce or where they stash snacks, but these habits can vary widely across households.
• Environmental influences: Kids, pets, lighting, and counter space all affect how a product is used or experienced.

Why it matters for CPG insights

These real-time observations feed directly into product usage research, uncovering unmet needs and usage patterns that consumers themselves might not articulate. For example, a cooking oil brand might learn that consumers are hesitant to use its product because the bottle leaks into their cabinets. Or a health-focused cereal brand might see that parents are combining it with sugary cereals to get kids to eat healthier – insight that can inform both product innovation and messaging.

By using in-home visits as part of their qualitative research toolkit, companies get beyond assumed behaviors and into the realm of actual context-driven use. This leads to stronger, more empathetic design decisions grounded in truth, not guesses.

Empathy Treks powered by home visits help turn these real-life moments into inspiration – driving ideas for labeling changes, packaging redesign, new product concepts, or merchandising strategies. In short, they help CPG brands stay relevant and consumer-centric in an increasingly competitive landscape.

When it comes to understanding true consumer behavior, there’s no substitute for observing people in the spaces where they naturally use your products. That’s the core of in-home ethnographic research for CPG brands. These are the moments you can’t replicate in a focus group or fully capture in a survey – where daily routines, habits, and decision-making unfold in real time.

The Kitchen: The Heart of the Home

The kitchen reveals how food and household products fit into consumers’ actual lives. You learn not just what people buy, but how they store items, how often they cook, who does the shopping, and how packaging functionality affects usage. Patterns emerge: mismatched containers, forgotten ingredients stuffed in the back of a fridge, or bulk purchases driven by savings rather than real consumption needs.

These subtle but important details provide a fuller picture of usage drivers and consumer intentions – insights that can identify unmet needs and spark product innovation.

The Bathroom: A Private, Insight-Rich Space

Bathrooms might be the last place you'd think of for market research, but for many CPG categories – personal care, cleaning, hygiene – they’re incredibly relevant. In these intimate spaces, researchers observe how products are arranged, which items are prioritized, and how habits vary between morning and evening routines.

For example, a consumer may say they use a face wash daily, but a glance at the nearly full bottle tells a different story. These types of non-verbal insights help researchers understand motivation gaps or barriers to consistent usage.

The Pantry: A Window Into Choices and Trade-Offs

A pantry doesn't just store food – it reveals priorities, planning behaviors, and even emotional relationships with food. Organized pantries may reflect a sense of control and planning, while cluttered or chaotic ones may reveal aspirational buying habits that don’t align with daily life. You might see a mix of name-brand and private label items, uncovering how consumers make trade-offs based on price, convenience, or brand trust.

Each of these spaces is an opportunity to observe consumer decisions in context. It’s in the real-life details – like the empty coffee container still sitting on the shelf or the condiment bought months ago but never used – that deep CPG insights are uncovered. These moments go far beyond what people self-report, revealing the ‘why’ behind the ‘what.’

Understanding pantry behavior, kitchen workflows, and bathroom routines contributes to a richer, more empathetic consumer journey. And that empathy is the foundation for meaningful innovation.

It’s one thing to observe interesting consumer behaviors in their homes – what matters most is what you do with those insights. That’s where great research connects to real business value. In-home visits aren't just about storytelling. They inform smarter, more human-centered strategies, from packaging to product positioning.

From Insight to Innovation

When you notice that several households store their cleaning products in hard-to-reach places, it may spark a rethink in ergonomics or packaging design. If a parent improvises with products to make lunch easier for kids, there may be an opportunity for a new format that better fits their needs.

Empathy trek research uncovers these moments – often small, subtle details – that can evolve into breakthrough product or brand ideas. For example:

• Repackaging personal care products based on real bathroom storage constraints
• Developing snack packaging that's easier for children to open based on kitchen observations
• Creating messaging that supports how a product contributes emotionally to family routines, not just functional outcomes

What makes in-home consumer insights powerful is their ability to expose the underlying context behind product usage. These are often the insights that never surface in traditional surveys or even interviews, where people may not be fully aware of their own behaviors or biases.

Collaborating to Interpret Human Signals

After gathering observations, the interpretation phase begins. This involves synthesizing findings, connecting patterns, and translating them into clear, usable insights for cross-functional teams – marketing, product development, R&D, and more. At SIVO, our qualitative research experts work closely with stakeholders to ensure these insights don’t stay locked in a report but instead become tools for action.

Sometimes, the most actionable discoveries come not from what consumers say, but from what they do when they think no one’s watching. These telling moments fuel ideas tailored to real behaviors, not assumptions.

That’s the true value of home visits research: turning moments of observation into product usage research that shapes decision-making and drives growth. And when paired with other data sources – like surveys or AI-derived trends – they enrich your strategic thinking with human understanding.

As artificial intelligence and digital surveys continue to evolve, many brands wonder: is in-person research still necessary? The answer is a resounding yes – especially in the context of consumer empathy. While AI and surveys can rapidly collect and analyze vast amounts of data, they can't truly substitute the nuanced understanding that comes from human-centered qualitative research.

Technology Explains the ‘What’ – In-Home Visits Uncover the ‘Why’

AI-powered tools and traditional surveys are excellent at identifying trends: which products are popular, how preferences shift by demographic, and what purchase behaviors are most frequent. But they can’t always explain why those patterns exist. In-home ethnographic research for CPG brands brings the story behind the stats to life.

For example, surveys might show a drop in usage for a specific cleaning product. AI might correlate that with a rise in competitors’ ads. But during an empathy trek, researchers might notice consumers skipping steps in their cleaning routine – not because of cost or new loyalty, but because the product lid is hard to open with wet hands. These are friction points that technology alone often misses.

Seeing the Unexpected

Humans naturally adapt products for their own needs – cutting open a toothpaste tube to get the last bit, pouring cereal into a resealable bag, or using a facial moisturizer as hand cream. These real-life improvisations point to product design or branding opportunities, but they're invisible in big data.

By combining structured data with rich in-person observations, brands get a fuller picture of the consumer journey. Think of it as pairing the scale of AI with the depth of empathy that only human experience provides.

Why Both Matter in Modern CPG Research

At SIVO, we believe that market research for CPG brands is strongest when it integrates multiple tools. Surveys help quantify. AI helps predict. But in-person empathy treks reveal emotion, context, and unspoken needs – the drivers behind everyday behavior.

In-person doesn’t mean “old-fashioned” – it means complementary. It's about giving your strategy soul and substance through understanding people as they really live. Together, these tools form a more complete research ecosystem that empowers smarter, more human-led innovation.