How should you position your brand?
MARKET RESEARCH FOR EFFECTIVE BRAND POSITIONING & MESSAGING
How can brands ensure successful positioning in a competitive space? Companies must examine the interconnections of all the elements of their brand—benefits, emotions, actions, behaviors, and sensory cues—to understand how to position the brand for growth. And just as important as brand positioning, is how you communicate about your brand, product or service to your target audience.
Looking to your consumer first, and their behavioral motivation from impression to purchase, will inform where your brand needs to be in order to succeed in a competitive landscape—and your marketing messaging. By tapping into the human behaviors and discovering where brand associations should be positioned, you can tie in your product and service holistically with the entire product life-cycle, from concept to final sale.
MARKETING MESSAGING
BRAND DEVELOPMENT
How we solve it.
IMPLICIT / EXPLICIT TESTING
Implicit testing avoids the inaccuracy of direct Q&A responses to yield a more accurate predictor of behavior by capturing native emotional reactions as well as rational thinking.
Research to help companies make faster, more informed clean label decisions requires accurate prediction of behavior reactions—approach or avoid—to branded products with given claims and ingredient labels. Asking a research participant to directly predict their behaviors in response to a brand, claim or ingredient is known to be a poor predictor of actual behavior.

How we solve it.
PASSIVE TRACKING BEHAVIORS
Our Social Intelligence team provides an in-depth analysis of historical & current conversations around your specific topic or behavior. Aside from traditional social channels, we track blog, forum, Reddit, and news site conversations to provide a holistic picture of consumer perception. (If desired, we can isolate specific products to pull in Amazon or other online review conversations)
This analysis of historical conversations is used to identify possible “on-ramp” moments and cues which we will use to target specific behaviors. Using this knowledge, we use short surveys to people who have their devices passively tracked, to identify what primes or messages disrupt and change their metered behaviors.
Deliverables from the Social Intelligence Analysis include (and not limited to):
- Key conversation drivers of positive & negative sentiment + emotion in a purchase decision pathway (drivers defined by amount of engagement/reach of consumer posts)
- Common category-level themes
- Brand-by-brand comparisons
- Shifts in perception over time
- Share of voice between competing brands/products within the category
Overall – Isolating positive & negative sentiment
Influences – Influential social users driving conversation
- Influential websites (blogs, forums, industry news sites) where conversation is occurring
Benefits to passive metering include an unscripted view into a consumer’s digital footprint…their entire online presence. While forward-recruited consumers are primed on the topic of interest, they are not given additional instructions which might guide their behaviors or generate overly pronounced focus on reviews, forums, competitor sites, etc. Which provides a unique opportunity for a raw, more true-to-life perspective on what it’s like to follow the purchase pathway; a true “digital ethnography.”

MAPPING THE GUEST JOURNEY
Destination Insights™ is InsightsNow’s behavioral framework for understanding the consumer/guest journey. It provides a behavioral foundation for the study of the consumer decision journey specifically seeking out those moments where you are, or have the opportunity to, change their destination.
This unique framework is built on the underlying behavioral principle that movement along a journey is triggered by three types of cues which trigger desire, consideration, or selection. Identifying the cues and the moments in which these cues motivate behavior is the focus of our consumer journey research.
To find the greatest opportunity for disruption, we identify opportunities to use new cues or modify existing cues and triggers to change a person’s behavior.

How we solve it.
RAPID IN-STORE TESTING
There is nothing like having real product and real merchandizing in actual stores to understand how well they will perform.
In-store testing is available for grocery stores. It can be in as few as one retail store or on a larger scale at many stores in several markets. Optionally this In-store testing can be expanded to assess other options such as, multiple markets, A/B testing to see how different packaging or products perform, or how different retailing pricing or promotional tactics improve sales.
In a typical study we research:
- An in-store testing against planogram or positioning options
- Number of stores: 6-8 in one market
- Number of consumers 200-400 –with 2 SKU’s in store
- Types of store – major grocery chain
- Key KPI values – in-store metrics on trial: vote with wallet
- Follow-up after purchase with 100-200 guests who bought to assess repeat potential and performance to benefit assessments, including video testimonials.
If your products are not ready for full retail testing we can put them in a mock store and use eye tracking and physiology monitoring to understand how people will react when they see (or don’t see) your product on the shelf. Learn how merchandizing will work in a mini research setting store when you have limited supply to complete a full scale retail study.

PRICE SENSITIVITY ANALYSIS
A purchase behavior is always a value decision that includes the price as a factor. What are the guardrails for pricing products in order to provide more competitive prices and stop loss of share and shelf space? Our predictive models of brand share show how consumers look at price/value for your products or concepts to maximize your market share and revenue. By conducting price sensitivity analysis, you identify segments of the population that consider attributes of your product valuable, and the price they are willing to pay for those.

How we solve it.
IMPLICIT / EXPLICIT TESTING
Implicit testing avoids the inaccuracy of direct Q&A responses to yield a more accurate predictor of behavior by capturing native emotional reactions as well as rational thinking.
Research to help companies make faster, more informed clean label decisions requires accurate prediction of behavior reactions—approach or avoid—to branded products with given claims and ingredient labels. Asking a research participant to directly predict their behaviors in response to a brand, claim or ingredient is known to be a poor predictor of actual behavior.

How we solve it.
IMPLICIT / EXPLICIT TESTING
Implicit testing avoids the inaccuracy of direct Q&A responses to yield a more accurate predictor of behavior by capturing native emotional reactions as well as rational thinking.
Research to help companies make faster, more informed clean label decisions requires accurate prediction of behavior reactions—approach or avoid—to branded products with given claims and ingredient labels. Asking a research participant to directly predict their behaviors in response to a brand, claim or ingredient is known to be a poor predictor of actual behavior.

How we solve it.
LADDERING TECHNIQUES
Laddering showcases how sensorial and perceptual cues are connected to benefits, emotional connections and ultimately help brands understand how to communicate their pillars in a concrete fashion. At InsightsNow we focus on laddering up from benefits to the emotional and behavioral values, as well as laddering down to get to specific behavioral signals and subconscious cues. This ensures the overall connections are relevant for both marketers and product developers.

INSIGHTSNOW SOLUTIONS
FOOD PRODUCT COMMERCIALIZATION
SHOPPERLENS
FULL-SERVICE RESEARCH
CRAEVS SOLUTION
CLEAN LABEL RESEARCH THROUGH AGILE EVOLUTIONS INTO STORES
The CRAEVS project team consists of CuliNex (Product Development) and InsightsNow (Consumer Research). Together our companies have formed a strategic alliance to provide CPG clients with a turnkey product development methodology called CRAEVS (Clean Label Research Through Agile Evolutions into Stores). CRAEVS is fast, efficient, flexible, and cost effective, and specifically designed to create or improve products in disruptive new categories.

RETAIL TESTING
There’s nothing like having real product on shelf to see how well it performs.
In-store testing is available for grocery stores. It can be in as few as one retail store or on a larger scale at many stores in several markets. Optionally this In-store testing can be expanded to assess other options such as, multiple markets, A/B testing to see how different packaging or products perform, or how different retailing pricing or promotional tactics improve sales.
In a typical study we research:
- An in-store testing against planogram or positioning options
- Number of stores: 6-8 in one market
- Number of consumers 200-400 –with 2 SKU’s in store
- Types of store – major grocery chain Key KPI values – in-store metrics on trial: vote with wallet
- Follow-up after purchase with 100-200 guests who bought to assess repeat potential and performance to benefit assessments, including video testimonials.

CATEGORY ADVISORS COMMUNITY
InsightsNow’s Primary Shopper Category Advisors are a purposefully selected community of people who are eager to provide their opinions and evaluations of products within the categories they regularly purchase. They are hand selected in specific US markets where we can courier them any type of product (including frozen and special handling required). They are articulate which makes them highly adept at evaluating your products and explaining themselves through qualitative discussions.
Using our community is an affordable and market centric way to get your products evaluated in home with consumers to drive business success. Simplify your complex and costly recruiting practices and focus on your real target market – your category buyers – who can give you the knowledge you need to make clear decisions.

NEED FULL-SERVICE RESEARCH?
No matter what problem you are looking to solve, InsightsNow has a research solution we can build for you. We believe no part of the development process exists in a silo, so we can work with our clients to blend various approaches and techniques together to provide deep dives into human behavior. A full toolbox allows you to collaborate with us most effectively by choosing the best mix of tools to engage for your study's objectives, and get the insights that drive business results.
