I have a test tomorrow morning, I have just discovered your site today, so please if you could do quickly. thanks!!
I’m going to talk about my internship at Urgo. For the first part, I’ll give you a short presentation of the company. Then I’m going to talk about my missions and I will show you one of my important missions.
Urgo is a pharmaceutical company found in 1880 in Dijon by Eugène Fournier and Pierre Bon. At the beginning, Laboratoires Urgo was specialized in plasters to treat daily injuries. Gradually, company products have been diversified and today brand portfolio is larger than before. In fact, I’m working on various brand such as Urgo, Humer, Humex, Alvityl, GOVital and Immunostim too (which are company’s other product)
I have started to work at Urgo in September 2017, as research assistant. My work is divided in three big parts.
• Exploratory studies: it’s a research work. We have a subject we don’t know about, and we have to find as much information as possible in order to examine the question from all sides. For example, I worked on eczema, so I did some research about different types of eczema, medical and no medical treatments, testimonies, and so on.
• Qualitative studies: That’s my favourite part. It’s also a work of exploration. It consisted in collecting information by interviewing consumers on a product or a concept. I will develop an example in my second part.
• Quantitative studies: Most of the time, It allows to quantify results after qualitative studies. It is in the form of questionnaires, with opened and closed questions.
Now, I’m going to illustrate one of my favourite missions. Since September 2017, we organize qualitative studies called focus groups which are meetings with consumers in order to have their opinions. I did many focus groups and I want to talk about one’s: on Humer which are our natural brand.
We received 8 consumers to talk about nasal sprays. Consumers was 8 mothers which use lots of nasal sprays.
In the first part (around 30 minutes), we talked about their habits: they explained us what kind of products they are using to fight winter pathologies, allergies, to make prevention, or in daily cleaning. They also talked about their brand choices (price, size) and about their preferences (natural product or not for example) and so on.
In the second part (around 30 minutes), we introduced new Humer concepts: 4 nasal sprays with different ingredients (seawater, aloe vera, thermal water, salt water). The aim is to collect all positive and negative facets of concepts identified by consumers. They could see and touch the product and debated on ingredients, size, price, and so on.
Then, during 45 minutes, we introduced some concepts of new products already tested by pharmacists during pharmacist connect, in order to keep or delete the concept.
After this part, during around 15 minutes, we summarized with interviewers main information of the focus groups : what is the best and why, what we have to change if we want market concepts, what is the ideal price according to them.
My work during focus groups is to take all the important information, and especially, after it to do a report on ppt and send it at product manager.
It was just an example, but in general I can say that work of research assistant is to test ideas and facilitate product managers to make decisions.
I recently lead a consumer connect, which is a small focus group with four groups of two persons. My next challenge is to lead a focus group with a bigger group of 8 to 10 persons.
I hope I pronounced all of your brands correctly. I'm sorry, but I've never heard of them before.