Consumer Insights & Profiles — Oakley
Oakley's teams were reinventing their target audience with every product launch. We replaced assumptions with ethnography — and built consumer profiles that became the foundation of the brand, from R&D to marketing.
The brief was to define and humanize Oakley's universal strategic target and its associated consumer profiles — with unique emotional drivers, motivations, values, and attitudes — to create strategic focus across all internal teams and guide future marketing and product development.
The internal pain was real, and stakeholders said it plainly: "We're currently making assumptions about our consumers, and this leads to inconsistency in products and marketing." "We reinvent our target audience with every product launch." And the hardest one: younger consumers saw Oakley as a brand for NASCAR dads and Middle America.
We started inside: stakeholder interviews with eleven senior Oakley leaders across analytics, R&D, marketing, product strategy, and design. Then we went into consumers' homes — fifteen one-on-one, in-home, on-camera ethnographic interviews, ninety minutes each, split evenly by gender across two age cohorts in Portland, Seattle, and Los Angeles, with pre-interview lifestyle logs.
What we heard inside the company was as revealing as what we heard outside. "Oakley is a lens company more than anything." Superior fit was "a huge differentiator, but we don't talk about it enough." The weakness wasn't the product — it was the storytelling.
The strategic target we defined was The Committed — "Every day I strive to be better than the day before. When I have the right gear, I feel unstoppable." Underneath it, five research-validated profiles: The Trailblazers ("I'm here to make my own path"), The Contenders ("I'm here to win" — the people for whom, if it didn't happen on Strava, it never happened), The Connectors ("I'm here to be a part of something"), The Individuals, and The Lifers ("I'm here for the tried and true").
All of it laddered up to a brand essence: We ignite human possibility.
We designed and facilitated company-wide workshops to make the profiles operational, not decorative: day-in-the-life building, product-to-profile and athlete-to-profile mapping, and brand-touchpoint exercises. (The training deck taught the persona method using a profile built entirely around Homer Simpson — the fastest way to teach a room what a profile is and isn't.)
11
Senior stakeholder interviews
15
In-home ethnographic interviews
5
Consumer profiles adopted company-wide
The profiles were rolled out across the company. One shared answer to the question every team had been answering differently: who are we for?
"The foundation of our brand — from R&D, to product design, to business analytics, to marketing."Oakley, on the consumer profiles framework