Understanding consumer opinion of your product is key in order to drive product superiority and consumer loyalty
To create loyalty, delivering a superior product versus your key competitors is essential...
According to our new research in partnership with Bazaarvoice Inc., more than a third (39%) of global consumers purchased from new brands during quarantine. The data, which analyses the shopping habits of more than 8,000 consumers across the UK, US, Canada, France, Germany and Australia, shows that a significant 88% of consumers will continue to buy from those brands in the future.
Such a high proportion of converts for a new/different brand illustrates how similar (or similarly acceptable) products typically can be in the minds of consumers, and also identifies an inherent lack of brand loyalty.
To create loyalty, delivering a superior product versus your key competitors is essential. It requires a deep understanding of consumers’ opinions of your product through statistical analysis and identifying how to optimise it. While consumers’ opinion may state your product is not sweet enough, or too firm, does this impact their overall opinion, and which attributes should you really focus on?
How to maximise a product’s potential:
- A key driver analysis investigates the strength of the relationships between potential drivers and overall consumer opinion, i.e. what attributes such as taste, texture, appearance, etc, are most likely to influence overall opinion, and ultimately, where to focus future R&D investment. The key factors to improve will have relatively low performance and high importance scores; improving these should lead to greatest improvement in product performance.
- At a more granular level, penalty analysis investigates how the current levels of product attributes (such as sweetness, firmness, strength of flavour, etc) are impacting product opinion and the specific opportunities to improve. While 30% may say a product is too sweet, it may also be that these consumers still have a high opinion of the product. Just taking the consumers’ word for it isn’t always going to lead to prioritising the correct product improvements. Understanding the overall opinion among the various consumer subgroups, based on their preference per attribute, allows specific elements to be tweaked and improved. This ensures that time and effort can be focussed on making changes which have the greatest impact by driving opinion the most.
Understanding consumer opinion of your product and using statistical analysis on how to drive higher overall opinion provides an insightful and actionable route forward to R&D. It ensures you can prioritise key product improvements, to ultimately drive product superiority and consumer loyalty, and help your product be among those that consumers can’t be without.
For more information on how we can help FMCG brands successfully navigate these times, please get in touch.