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Love at first sight? Conversations with consumers predict product success

by Dr. Danica Allen , 20.07.2015

In today’s experience economy, consumers are bombarded with new experiences every day – proposals for new products, new services, and new consumption models – to improve their lives. In a world that promises compelling experiences, fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) brands struggle to deliver against these aspirations in a way that have a real effect on targets.

The field of market research is slow to adopt the behaviors of the present, digital generation. Traditional survey design remains exactly what it is – traditional. As researchers, many continue to impose feedback mechanisms and structures that – given today’s technological capabilities – are foreign to consumers. To be sure, people use words and conversations to express their attitudes and preferences, not marketing research scales.

Imagine you had the ability to understand not only what, but how consumers felt about your products.  Imagine you had access to this cutting-edge research at every stage of your innovation journey.

At GfK we perceive a paradigmatic change in survey research wherein the two-way, unstructured conversation will enhance the dated, traditional world of multi-point scales with new emotion and authenticity.

In their widely recognized book “Built to Love,” Boatwright and Cagan (2010) emphasize how crucial consumer emotion is for successful product creation. The authors demonstrate that the payoff of emotion as a lever of new product success is more than linear. In our exceedingly noisy world, consumers are constantly bombarded with new offers. As a result, consumers largely filter all they see and hear. A bit of love and excitement can capture the attention of consumers, and have a significant impact on sales.

Brand and product managers are responsible for a pipeline of new products that create sustainable and relevant consumer experiences. Many suspect that traditional ways of testing new concepts and products do not provide sufficient direction for well-founded decisions primarily because:

  • Existing key performance indicators (KPIs) do not adequately measure emotional engagement, therefore falling short in predicting adoption; and
  • Data collection no longer matches the prevailing ways in which consumers interact, and thus is neither sufficiently engaging nor does it collect authentic feedback.

Learn more about GfK’s thought leadership in the white paper.

For more information contact danica.allen@gfk.com and dirk.moersdorf@gfk.com.

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