Few businesspeople dispute the importance of consumer research to a marketing plan, but rare indeed is the industry leader that chooses to reposition an entire brand based on a study.

However, office-supply giant OfficeMax is poised to do just that.

Driven by new research on customers’ shopping experiences and expectations, the Illinois-based retailer has launched a comprehensive marketing and brand repositioning effort aimed primarily at the company’s newly defined target audience: women.

The national campaign — titled “Life is Beautiful, Work Can Be Too™” — was crafted in response to recent OfficeMax findings that showed that women either control or influence the vast majority of office-product purchases in the retail and B-to-B arenas. As a result, in a marketing world still reluctant to trust statistical measurements to drive campaigns, OfficeMax is proving that a data-driven approach can yield new strategies (and perhaps huge dividends) for brands willing to trust the numbers.

“Our research findings helped us forge a new perspective on the role women play,” says Ryan Vero, OfficeMax executive vice-president and chief merchandising officer. “This is not an exclusionary approach, but a focus that allows us to concentrate on a key audience while still attracting and serving all.”

The campaign is designed to offer women creative, intimate shopping experiences and new private-label product lines. The decision to focus more on women shoppers stems from wide-ranging research the company conducted a few years ago that showed that women either directly control or exert significant influence over about 85 percent of purchases in retail and business-to-business channels.

Prior to the study, the company was like other industry peers, in that they tend to market to a much broader, much less defined audience of business customers, says Vero.

But after looking at traditional market research -– and, more critically, at responses from an OfficeMax-sponsored survey of 5,000 women customers — the retailer decided to reconsider its focus. As part of this change, the company launched in December its “Life is Beautiful, Work Can Be Too” campaign, which is designed to combat the stereotype of the workplace as dull. “An estimated 80 million Americans work in drab cubicles,” he says. “Workers are starved for inspiration and need new outlets of expression. The ‘Life is Beautiful, Work Can Be Too’ campaign is intended to provide inspiration and counter negative work stereotypes.”

A major component of the campaign is an overhaul of the company’s branded Maxi Catalog, which has been revamped into a stylish, magazine-like publication that features a black, glossy cover, sleek photography, tabbed stickers to mark items of interest and flower-and-vine graphics that tie back to the advertising campaign. Seven versions of the Maxi Catalog went out to more than one million B2B and B2C targets. And page count in the publication was beefed up from 1,000 to 1,100. “Our catalog is modern, stylish and beautiful, featuring attractive photography, elegant layouts and recognizable tools like tabbed stickers,” boasts Vero. “We designed it to present our products and services in a way that will resonate with our women customers.” Vero says this was also driven by data, as the OfficeMax study of women consumers showed that they craved more creative shopping experiences, even within the pages of the catalog.