You Might Think It Tastes Good, But Will Consumers? Market Research Testing For New Entrants In The Consumer Food Market
The consumer food market is a competitive industry, and many entrants don't succeed. To maximize your revenue and chances of success, it's important to gain every competitive edge you can. One of these areas is market research, which allows you to determine how potential consumers will view your product before you even put it on the market — this lets you make changes before sinking money into production costs. This is even more important if you're a small vendor, as the large food corporations are experts at using market research to target their consumer food products. Here's how a market research facility can help small food vendors better target and sell their delicious consumer food goods.
Taste Testing Ensures Repeat Purchases
One of the most important services that market research facilities provide to food vendors is the blind taste test. In this focus group, participants taste your product and give their feedback, including whether or not they would purchase your product again.
For this test you will be asked to provide several samples of your product made with different ingredients in order to find which one consumers prefer best. You'll also need to provide which subset of consumers you are intending to target, and where your products are likely to be distributed. This way the taste test data can be tailored to your preferred consumer — if your product is distributed mainly to health food stores, the preferences of consumers who regularly shop at health food stores are weighted more heavily than those who never shop at these stores. This helps ensure that you are creating a product that caters to the consumers who will actually see your goods on the store shelf.
Product Ideation and Packaging Entices Consumers to Make Their First Purchase
Another important part of marketing food products is product ideation. This is how consumers feel about your product, and includes whether consumers feel that your product is healthy or unhealthy, along with whether consumers feel your product is for children or mainly for adults. This is an important factor in whether or not consumers will purchase your product for the first time when they see it on the store shelves.
If you're a new entrant to the consumer food industry, consumers will have no idea what to expect based on your brand history or advertising, so they will rely mainly on the packaging of your product for their ideation. A market research facility can help you with this by asking consumers to rate how they feel about different package designs in a focus group environment. You'll get a feel for which package best communicates the intent of your product to potential consumers, which in turn will entice consumers to purchase your product over others, even if they have not seen any advertising and don't know anything about your product brand.
If you're launching a new consumer food product, whether locally distributed or nationwide, contact a professional market research facility to have your product taste-tested and to find the package design that best communicates your product's intent to consumers. You want to ensure that consumers are enticed to purchase your product, are pleased with its taste, and are eager to purchase it again.