What is CPG (Consumer Packaged Goods) research?

Consumer packaged goods research, or CPG research, comprehensively examines market trends, consumer behaviour, competitive analysis, and product performance within the CPG industry. This provides a holistic view of the consumer-packaged goods market, helping businesses make strategic decisions grounded in robust data.

CPG research methodologies help organisations:

• Understand the target demographic’s preferences and buying habits
• Evaluate the success of the marketing strategy
• Forecast future market trends.

What does CPG research include?
CPG research includes studying the impact of price changes, promotional activities, and brand positioning on product sales. At its core, CPG research involves a deep dive into various areas of the consumer-packaged goods industry, employing multiple research methodologies to tap into:

1. Market trends
2. Consumer preferences
3. Competitive landscapes
4. Product performance.

What are the research methods for CPG?
CPG research methodologies can be qualitative and quantitative.

Qualitative research methodologies include:

• Group discussions
• In-depth interviews
• Ethnographic studies (consumer behaviors, attitudes, needs).

Quantitative research methodologies include:

• Surveys
• Online tracking
• Field trials (market size, market share, promotional effectiveness, sales performance).

These different research techniques provide rich insights into what motivates consumers, how they perceive different products, and why they make their buying decisions. You can also combine methodologies using experimental designs to test hypotheses about cause-and-effect relationships, such as the impact of price or feature changes on product sales.

What is the value of conducting CPG research?
All the insights gained through CPG research contribute to the strategic decision-making process in businesses. By understanding current consumer behaviour and preferences, CPG research enables businesses to monitor and measure their market performance.

Gathering data on sales, market share, and consumer feedback, helps evaluate the effectiveness of a marketing strategy and make necessary adjustments. This performance evaluation can extend to competitors, providing valuable insights into their strategies and allowing for the identification of opportunities and threats in the market landscape.

It can help forecast future market trends and analyse past and current data to effectively predict consumer behaviour, market growth, and product performance. Fundamentally, it informs future strategies and ensures the business stays ahead of the curve.

Summary: why is consumer packaged goods marketing important?
CPG research helps you to understand your target market and map out how and why people buy. What triggers the need? Who’s involved? What matters to them? Where do they look? And who do they trust?

CPG research also helps businesses develop compelling products and identify unmet needs. As well as enhance branding so that you can track progress, optimise initiatives, build business cases, and course correct. Finally, it helps you to remain relevant to your target audiences by developing, testing, and optimising marketing communications to capture attention.

Click here to find out more about how we help global brands drive product performance within the CPG industry.