Turning behavioural insight into profitable growth.
Partner
Birds Bakery
Food Manufacturing
Project
Customer Behaviour & Brand Perception Research
From heritage brand to behaviour-led growth.
For over a century, Birds Bakery has been part of everyday life across the East Midlands. A family-owned business with more than 60 stores, its brand is rooted in quality, freshness and community trust.
In 2025, Birds entered a pivotal three-year growth phase, focused on exceptional products, profitable sales growth, operational efficiency, and becoming the business they need to be for the future.
Following a rebrand and strategic reset, the leadership team wanted confidence that their internal brand pillars, quality, freshness, provenance and trusted value, were genuinely resonating with customers.
The aim:
Move from “What we think customers value…”
to “What actually drives behaviour – and what prevents it?”
- The challenge
From assumption to behavioural evidence.
Birds were making significant commercial decisions around store investment, digital development, product range evolution, trading hours and value positioning.
Yet much of their understanding of customers was operationally derived or anecdotal.
Traditional customer research would have measured awareness, satisfaction and stated intention.
But intention does not equal behaviour.
Birds needed to understand:
- What enables or blocks purchase
- Why some customers visit weekly – and others occasionally
- The emotional and habitual drivers behind loyalty
- Where brand perception diverged from brand intention
This wasn’t about data volume.
It was about behavioural mechanics.
- The strategy
A behavioural framework, not just a survey.
We designed a four-phase research programme grounded in the COM-B model of behaviour change – ensuring insight translated into practical action.
COM-B examines three critical drivers of behaviour:
Capability – Do customers know, understand and feel able?
Opportunity – Is the environment enabling purchase?
Motivation – What emotional, social and habitual forces are at play?
This framework ensured the research moved beyond opinion and into what actually drives buying decisions.
- The output
Planning & data audit
- Collation of existing internal data
- Behaviourally designed survey framework
- Defined segments and distribution strategy
Quantitative survey
- Measurement of habits, motivations, barriers and routines
- Behaviour-led segmentation hypotheses
- Early persona modelling based on behavioural patterns – not demographics alone
Persona-specific focus groups
- Behavioural customer research on four targeted focus groups (up to 10 participants each)
- In-store facilitation to maintain contextual realism
- Deep exploration of ritual, identity, loyalty and occasion
- Behavioural template analysis using COM-B
Integration & intervention design workshop
- In-person leadership workshop
- Translation of insight into marketing and service design implications
- Creation of a behavioural intervention matrix
- Clear strategic recommendations for growth
- The impact
Clarity before investment.
While commercial performance data is still being tracked, the immediate outcomes are strategic and structural.
Birds now have:
- A clear behavioural segmentation model
- Defined customer personas based on motivation and habit
- Evidence-led understanding of purchase barriers
- Insight into perception gaps between brand intention and reality
- A behavioural intervention framework to guide marketing investment
The insights are directly informing messaging strategy – ensuring customers feel understood, not targeted.
More precision.
Less assumption.
Smarter growth decisions.
What we did.
- Behavioural insight (COM-B & TDF application)
- Mixed-method research design (quant + qual)
- Behavioural segmentation & persona development
- Leadership integration workshops
- Marketing and brand positioning strategy translation
Why it worked.
Because it focused on behaviour – not just opinion.
Traditional research tells you what customers say.
Behavioural customer research and behavioural science helps you understand what they do – and why.
By combining quantitative scale with qualitative depth, and grounding everything in COM-B, the work bridged commercial decision-making with behavioural evidence.
Not “just” market research.
A strategic growth tool.