America’s Test Kitchen

Cross Portfolio Personas are a Recipe for Success

Understanding the Modern Home Cook to Drive Digital Strategy

  • Alignment Workshops

    Bring stakeholders together through structured, facilitated sessions that establish priorities and strategies for a path forward.

  • In-Depth Interviews

    Climb inside the world of the user with structured interviews that bring their unique voices into the design process.

  • Competitive Analysis

    See where you shine, where you don’t, and how to leverage that intel to fill the most important gaps in your experience.

  • Segmentation Studies

    Focus on the highest-value audiences and the differences that make a difference to them. Use segmentation research to target feature investment and align roadmaps to key business metrics.

  • Personas

    Bringing your target users to life with personas that are rooted in research and crafted with strategic data and insights creates a clear voice to model.

  • Quantitative Research

    Large scale instruments to gauge user preferences 
and behaviors to impact strategy, scope and 
design decisions.

  • Experience Strategy

    We evaluate internal perceptions, user goals and best practices to find that “special sauce” that drives an actionable roadmap for your future experience.

The Challenge

America’s Test Kitchen (ATK) had built a powerful multi-brand ecosystem spanning television, magazines, cookbooks, and digital platforms, but as digital became increasingly central to growth, the organization lacked a unified understanding of its audience. Different brands and products attracted different types of users, making it difficult to prioritize digital investments, align messaging, and efficiently target marketing spend. ATK needed to better understand who their most valuable audiences were, what they expected from digital experiences, and where they spent time online in order to shape both product strategy and customer acquisition efforts.

Image collage of ATK products
ATK’s media portfolio is extensive, spanning television, books, magazines and digital. Overlapping audiences and diverse brands required research to understand how it all connected.

Our Approach

We partnered with ATK to conduct a comprehensive audience profiling and segmentation study designed to uncover the motivations, behaviors, and digital expectations of both existing customers and prospective users. Using large-scale quantitative research across subscribers and active online recipe searchers, we analyzed not just demographics, but deeper behavioral and attitudinal patterns tied to cooking habits, confidence levels, goals, frustrations, and content consumption.

Image of an experience map
An inventory of ATK users (both subscribed and anonymous) yielded four distinct personas they could leverage to form a strategy cohesive.

The research also evaluated how audiences interacted with digital cooking experiences, including the importance of mobile access, instructional content, search behavior, and feature preferences. In parallel, we examined where users discovered recipes, sought inspiration, and engaged with cooking-related content online. This created a clear framework for understanding both product expectations and the channels most likely to influence acquisition and engagement.

Image of sketches created by workshop participants
Research include persona specific insights such as user’s Must, Should, Could and Won’t Haves, as well as data on method of consumption, and brand awareness.

The Results

The research transformed ATK’s understanding of its audience, enabling a shift to a segment-driven strategy that aligned product development and marketing with distinct user needs, unlocking more focused investment, stronger engagement, and more efficient growth.

  • Identified distinct audience groups with different motivations, behaviors, and digital expectations
  • Defined a high-value, digitally engaged audience to prioritize for growth
  • Refocused product roadmap on video, mobile, and trusted recipe experiences
  • Clarified baseline features required across all users
  • Improved marketing efficiency through better targeting and channel alignment
  • Revealed brand awareness gaps, unlocking cross-product growth opportunities

We are so glad we partnered with ZeroDegrees to help us truly understand our audience.

The persona work they delivered became a foundation for how we made product and marketing decisions grounding what had been internal debate in real data. Their work gave us the confidence to make smarter investments in our digital experience which drove meaningful results.

Fran Middleton Chief Digital Officer, America’s Test Kitchen