Delivered an independent consulting engagement for Procter & Gamble France — diagnosing why the Envie de Plus digital cashback programme failed to drive awareness, engagement, and retention among Gen Z and Millennial consumers, and designing a research-backed strategic and tactical roadmap to address each gap.
Envie de Plus is P&G France's digital cashback loyalty platform — a programme offering consumers money back on P&G product purchases. Despite the financial incentive, adoption and active engagement among younger consumers remained persistently low. The question P&G needed answered wasn't "does the offer work?" but "why aren't they finding it, trusting it, and coming back to it?"
My role was to bring independent, evidence-based perspective: design the research, execute it, analyse the data rigorously, benchmark the platform against competitors, and deliver a strategic report with actionable recommendations and a phased implementation roadmap.
The research combined three strands to triangulate findings — secondary desk research on the French cashback and loyalty market to establish context, qualitative interviews to surface nuanced consumer language and mental models, and a quantitative survey to test how widespread specific pain points were.
The analysis wasn't just descriptive — it was designed to identify the mechanisms behind low engagement, not just the symptoms.
The research consistently pointed to four distinct layers of friction — each requiring a different type of intervention.
Most Gen Z and Millennial consumers had never encountered Envie de Plus through in-store or digital touchpoints. The programme was invisible at the exact moment of product purchase — the point where intent and relevance are highest. Secondary digital channels were under-optimised for younger audiences.
Both the sign-up flow and the cashback submission process were experienced as unnecessarily complex. Participants described friction at multiple stages: creating accounts, uploading receipts, understanding which products qualified, and navigating redemption timelines. Each additional step was a potential drop-off point.
Gen Z respondents in particular expressed scepticism about data collection and how their information would be used. Perceived lack of transparency about P&G's data practices created a trust barrier that monetary incentives alone couldn't overcome. Privacy wasn't a minor concern — it was a pre-condition for engagement.
Even users who had registered tended to use the platform sporadically. There was no gamified progression system, no personalised relevance engine, and no social or community dimension to create habitual return. The programme was transactional where it needed to be relational.
I benchmarked Envie de Plus against leading competitor cashback and loyalty platforms on four dimensions — UX design, personalisation capability, sustainability communication, and gamification features. The analysis identified specific service gaps and innovation opportunities rather than generic comparisons.
The recommendations were structured around feasibility, impact, and sequencing — short-term tactical wins that build the foundation for longer-term strategic initiatives, with risk assessment at each stage.
The final deliverable was a 7,500-word consulting report presenting the full research methodology, findings, competitive analysis, and strategic recommendations — structured for a P&G France team to act on directly. The report included a feasibility assessment for each recommendation, a risk register, and a phased implementation roadmap prioritising quick wins alongside longer-term structural changes.
The research surfaced insights that generic surveys wouldn't have reached — particularly the privacy-as-precondition dynamic among Gen Z users, and the specific UX steps creating the highest drop-off intent. These informed recommendations that were specific rather than generic, evidence-grounded rather than assumed.
The most common failure mode in consumer research is confirming what everyone already suspects. The design challenge was to build a methodology that could surface unexpected findings — which is why the qualitative strand came first, shaping what the survey then tested at scale rather than the other way around.
"Privacy wasn't a secondary concern for Gen Z participants. It was the threshold condition for engagement — something no amount of monetary incentive alone could overcome."
This kind of insight only emerges in interviews, not surveys. The role of the mixed-methods design was precisely to capture that nuance and then test its prevalence quantitatively. That sequencing — qualitative discovery, then quantitative validation — is now a framework I apply whenever the question is "why aren't users doing what they're supposed to?"
The competitive benchmarking was similarly designed to be diagnostic rather than descriptive. Rather than listing what competitors do, I asked: at which specific moments in the user journey does Envie de Plus fall short of what a comparable platform offers? That specificity is what makes a benchmark useful for a product or marketing team actually trying to close a gap.