How would health-conscious consumers react to SUBWAY’s offerings?

Powerful one-pager poster aims to encourage clients to take action

CLIENT Institute of Design (Educational purpose)

Challenge

Help the client understand potential customers’ needs and next steps to attract new customers, especially health-conscious individuals.

Solution

One-pager poster(1ft×2ft) illustrating the gap between what each potential customer segment(vegans and organic proponents) are looking for and what Subway is actually offering.

Outcome

Based on a research, I created a 1*2 ft poster to communicate my insights to encourage Subway to consider the next actions to attract new customer segments, which is a group of health-conscious individuals.

Click here to see high resolution version (pdf)

Approach

1. Understand 

Coding the transcripts

I read over 30 pages of transcripts of a discussion by a group of health-conscious individuals. To organize this messy information, I created a list of meaningful quotes and categorized them based on the topics.

Developing insights with frameworks

Once I organized the information from the transcripts, I tried to make sense of the data by framing elements into frameworks. I tried to apply multiple frameworks and develop insights.

2. Define 

By analyzing the given transcripts and Subway’s current offering, I came up with 2 suggestions for Subway.

• Making information transparent

  Each health-conscious customer has a list of criteria they care about when choosing foods. For example, they wonder if the food is entirely vegan or organic. They also pay attention to where those foods came from, how they were produced, and whether they are natural. (non-GMO, non-enriched, etc.) However, if you step into the Subway store, you can see the ingredients of your sandwich, but you have no idea what they actually are. Unclear information about foods is the first obstacle customers would face, and they wouldn’t even bother buying sandwiches at Subway.

• Adapting their offerings to what customers want

  Even if Subway clarifies all the information, health-conscious customers will face another obstacle; Subway’s offerings are not meeting customers’ needs. For example, Subway is said to have a vegan menu among its protein options, which excludes vegan customers. Also, most of their ingredients are not organic(vegetables are GMO), which automatically excludes organic proponents. If Subway wants to expand its customer segments, it needs to expand its offerings to accommodate health-conscious customers’ needs.

3. Develop

Prototyping posters and getting feedback

Starting with low-fidelity idea sketches and prototypes, I made a full-size(2*1 ft) poster using InDesign and Illustrator. We printed our artifacts every week so that each of us could get feedback from classmates.

I designed the layout so that viewers can recognize the perception gap across the counter: while Subway is proud of its healthy offerings, health-conscious customers want something more than that.

4. Deliver

Finalizing the poster based on the feedback