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Research Tips

Consumer Connection - The Landscape Has Changed

Posted by InsightsNow Marketing Team on February 15, 2011

by Amanda Anderson, Marketing Associate

Not too long ago, the only form of gathering product preference and usage information from consumers was by sending surveys via U.S. Postal Service or by picking up a landline telephone and calling.  Most often these methods did not provide accurate findings for how consumers use products in-context (i.e. why they use and/or choose a product at that very moment and what the emotional implications are), since the use or purchase occasion occured hours or even days before the survey arrived or the phone call was placed.  In the last decade, things slightly improved with the popularity of online surveying.  But this technique also resulted in the purchase or usage occasion taking place hours or even days from when the online survey was completed.  Now, however, the landscape has changed even more dramatically.    

Paradox of Progress - Product Line Optimization, the Status Quo is Broken

Posted by InsightsNow Marketing Team on October 14, 2010

by Alec Maki, Product Marketing Manager

How do you…
- Make the most money with a product line? 
- Decide which line extensions to keep and which to prune? 
- Which will reach the most new consumers without stealing share from the rest of the line? 

In a push to expand market share, consumer packaged goods (CPG) brand teams have answered these same questions for decades.  Over time, marketing research tools have been developed to address these questions.  Even today, as new line extensions are brought to market, the same traditional tools are used.  In recent years however, a confluence of events has exposed limitations of these traditional methods.

You Want Me to Eat What?

Posted by Dave Lundahl on August 4, 2010

Summary of Dr. Dave Lundahl’s recent talk given at the IFT 2010 Annual Meeting:Three Steps for Changing Consumer Nutrition Behavior

How do you reconcile the need to change consumers’ nutrition behavior with developing wellness-related food products that sell?  In recent years, this is a question industry experts have been struggling with - as obesity in the U.S. continues to be one of the highest in the world.                

Thus far, efforts in the health and wellness community to improve diet have largely focused on changing the consumer.  Food science has given innovators the ability to bring more healthy food to market.  However, these efforts have had only marginal success in motivating a change in consumer buying behavior.  In order to bring about real change in the kinds of foods that consumers buy, fundamentals of human behavior need to be uncovered.

Research Tip: Testing products out of “season”

Posted by Greg Stucky on June 30, 2010

Many products are seasonal products, meaning that they are consumed more or in different ways in certain seasons than others. Conducting consumer research with seasonal products when they are out of season can create some real challenges as well as inconsistent results. To the extent possible a seasonal product should be tested in season. When this is not possible, take a more focused approach to identifying the right people to participate in your research. For instance, we were challenged to conduct consumer research with bratwursts in the winter. While bratwursts are consumed by most during the summer and fall, we were able to identify a smaller segment that grilled bratwursts year round. They would shovel a path to their BBQ whenever it snowed to bring that grilled taste to the table. Bringing in these consumers to taste bratwursts during the winter fit right into their typical behavior and kept the research results consistent even in the off season.

Getting Strategic: Focusing the Fuzzy Front End of Innovation

Posted by Dave Lundahl on March 17, 2010

Marketing researchers and their counterparts in product development, sensory researchers, have often been criticized by corporate executives for not being strategic enough. I have always found this interesting since strategists are the first to agree that they need better insights to develop strategy. Many strategy plans are often poorly implemented, resulting in unmet goals. Is it the fault of strategists for not inviting researchers to the table, or the fault of researchers for not delivering insights of strategic value?

Research Tip: Alienation Analysis

Posted by InsightsNow Research Staff on March 9, 2010

When making ingredient and process changes where the new product is known to be slightly different than the current product, we often are asked to provide an estimate of the degree to which the new product might alienate current users. Alienated users have a high probability of no longer purchasing the product simply because it has been changed. Because it is a purchase context we recommend assessing alienation branded not blind as is often done.