Consumer Research Strategies

Fifth Dimension presents Virtual Consumer Research, testing new products, redesigns and rebranding in a virtual world but with real respondents. The Consumer Research department offers a completely bespoke high quality, retail focused research environment called Discovery.

Discovery allows you to test and fully understand the impact of your merchandising, pricing and promotional decisions in today’s challenging retail environment. All this is performed in a completely virtual environment, giving you complete security and privacy over your test concepts.

Discovery’s methodology has been tested and proved highly effective by many of the world's largest manufacturing and retail businesses.

It’s a known fact that 80% of new product launches fail. Isn’t it wise to minimize the risks associated with launches, packaging redesigns or rebranding? Consumer Research conducted in hall tests and focus groups cannot recreate the environment and visual cues when at the actual point of purchase, leading to results which do not reflect an actual purchasing environment.

• Faster – virtual surveys provide sales results much faster than traditional market testing. Unlike market tests which require products to be in field for months, fieldwork itself normally only takes 1 to 2 weeks to complete, and results are available up to 4 weeks after close of field

• Control – changes in weather, out of stocks, promotional activity, and national holidays only exist in a virtual environment on client request, allowing such complicating factors to be strictly limited, or removed completely.
• Confidentiality – Because the environment is virtual, competitor companies will be unable to see designs in development until they are ready for launch. Additionally, should the redesign fail, it saves damaging the client-retailer relationship though loss of sales.
• Flexibility – Reorganising a fixture or an entire store is quick and easy to do in a virtual test. Adding POS or additional promotional material into store can be done in a matter of hours, without needing retailer permissions or arrangement fees.
• Cost – Virtual testing is frequently cheaper than a live market test, especially when the flexibility and control of the store environment is taken into account. Traditional testing involves implementing the scenarios in many stores with co-operation fees required. Virtual testing has none of these overheads.

Its applications are almost limitless – almost anything that can be done in a store environment can be researched virtually.

New Product Launches

Once an idea has made it through concept screening and service level refinement, the last stage before production is a test market. Simulating the launch of a new product within virtual testing in one, two or more stores is easy.

Variations on the launch can all be put into field at the same time, without the same high levels of cost for multiple store co-operations. These could include inclusion of POS, different types of packaging or different levels of shopper education before purchase.

Virtual research allows you to calculate the new turnover at category, brand, price segment and variant level, or using any other product factor you need to measure. You can then compare and contrast shopper behaviors such as purchase, browsing and reading the back of pack with any attitudinal or other measure that can be gathered in the virtual equivalent of the ‘in-store interview’

POS Effectiveness Testing

POS is so ubiquitous it has become almost invisible to the shopper, yet still exerts subtle influence. Many different executions can be screened for attention and impact via our eye-testing suite, so design can be ‘sense checked’. This ensures attention is attracted to the right parts and places of the design. Then the effectiveness of successful concepts can be assessed directly by measuring the sales lift in a virtual store.

The level and quality of spontaneous and prompted brand recall can be measured and compared to actual shopping behavior within the virtual test, and attitudes to the relevant brands can be measured for both conscious and unconscious impact.

Merchandising effectiveness

Another application for virtual test stores is measuring changes of consumer behavior with small in-store changes, such as remerchandising a fixture from an old to a new planogram. The hotspots of the fixture can be measured for browsing, volume sales, value share or any similar behavior measure with every change with each planogram, right down to a SKU level.

Alternatively, eye-tracking can be used to understand the methods shoppers use to search for a product on your planogram, tracking how consumers identify hotspots and defining the most used gaze-path.

Packaging and POS screening

Options for new product packaging, packaging redesign and POS executions can all be tested before they are put into production. Multiple possibilities can be narrowed down in a structured way using our eye-tracking technology, identifying hotspots in the design, and allowing the visual impact to be measured across a number of design variants.

Eye-tracking can be combined with both consumer interviews and focus groups to understand what works within the designs.

Advanced analytics

Fifth Dimension offers a variety of advanced analyses in order to go beyond the simple statistics of a shop. Sometimes simple per cent penetration, or mean score on Agree/Disagree isn’t enough to get a picture of your shoppers or your market. Perhaps you need to understand how turnover and purchase changes with increasing price. If your product is out of stock, or customers change their mind at the fixture – how much is that lost opportunity worth. Understand if the things your customers say are important to them really are, by analyzing what they say against actual behavior.

Fifth Dimension’s advanced analytics team can provide depth insight to your shopper research by utilizing more complex analysis methods such as factor analysis, derived importance, regression and more to provide the best usable insights required for the research.