In strictly quantitative studies of consumer feelings and behaviors, contact is rare between those conducting the research and analysis and those providing the data points in the forms of survey responses. The intent is to let the numbers do the talking. In contrast, the effectiveness of qualitative studies often hinges on the ability of a single moderator to develop a connection with the study participants. This grows complicated when it&rsquo;s time to run qualitative studies in multiple regions and languages, as any difficulties in communication between a moderator and study participants can mean missing out on valuable perspectives. With Qualitative Solutions, FlavorWiki brings the same attention to detail and technical expertise that makes their quantitative research effective to qualitative research. FlavorWiki&rsquo;s Qualitative Solutions leverage their multinational, multilingual network of research professionals and data scientists and their agile digital platform to develop powerful insights wherever the client needs.&nbsp;
There are several reasons why FlavorWiki&rsquo;s Qualitative Solutions can develop powerful insights regardless of the location of the study, and one of the most impactful of these is the expert design and analysis of those studies. FlavorWiki&rsquo;s talented team brings together experienced data scientists and researchers from around the world. For qualitative solutions like FlavorWiki&rsquo;s In-Depth Interviews (IDI), open-ended surveys, and focus groups, the team produces discussion guides that lead to more fruitful sessions. These guides carefully arrange questions and discussion prompts for participants in a way that builds their willingness to share their perspectives and feelings, keeps discussions relevant to the researchers&rsquo; needs, and generates more nuanced understandings of the participants&rsquo; perspectives as the discussions progress.
FlavorWiki&rsquo;s expert personnel also make use of refined methods for collecting and analyzing data from Qualitative Solutions to give clients valuable and reliable insights. Following a qualitative study, FlavorWiki&rsquo;s team members will transcribe the session. This transcription can be submitted to several potential types of analysis, which, coupled with video and audio elements, can provide powerful insights with plenty of context. One typical procedure makes use of FlavorWiki&rsquo;s proprietary machine-learning to detect key phrases throughout a study and arrange them in word bubbles which visually rank their importance to the study participants. This combination of cutting-edge technology and streamlined presentation is a hallmark of FlavorWiki&rsquo;s commitment to providing actionable insights.&nbsp;
Another crucial way in which FlavorWiki&rsquo;s Qualitative Solutions produce powerful consumer insights is through their insistence on developing a human connection with study participants. With a relative lack of structure, In-Depth Interviews, ethnographies, and focus groups rely on a trained and skillful moderator in order to produce useful data for analysis. Moderators can improve a study in many ways, like keeping conversation on topic, moving on from dead-ends, and promoting active participation in the discussion. This active participation is especially important, however. Participants who for whatever reason withhold or modify their responses cause researchers to miss out on potentially impactful perspectives.&nbsp;
Because a strong connection between the moderator and the participants is so essential to the effectiveness of qualitative studies, it is often necessary that the moderator shares as much linguistic and cultural background with the participants as possible. Any slight difficulty in communication risks participants being less willing to speak their mind, thereby undermining the effectiveness of the study. Even a moderator who speaks the same language fluently but as a second language will lack at least some of the participants&rsquo; vocabulary, slang, and cultural context. This can lead to misunderstanding which might interrupt the flow of conversation, cause false conclusions, or make participants less confident in the moderator, any of which will limit the effectiveness of the study.
FlavorWiki overcomes these linguistic and cultural barriers by recruiting and training moderators from the same countries as the participants in the given studies. FlavorWiki&rsquo;s expert and international staff identify, recruit, and train moderators according to internal standards which equip them to moderate the applicable qualitative studies. They are trained in the relevant digital tools and the soft skills to cultivate participation even through video and phone calls. As these moderators share cultural and linguistic context with the participants in the study, there is less opportunity for miscommunication which might hinder the flow of conversation or otherwise cause friction. By prioritizing and achieving this human connection with qualitative study participants, FlavorWiki can conduct enlightening interviews and focus groups anywhere the client may need.
FlavorWiki&rsquo;s Qualitative Solutions are supported by a digital toolset that has been designed with international applicability from the very beginning and which helps FlavorWiki initiate projects with minimal friction wherever and whenever the client may need. Developed by an international team, FlavorWiki&rsquo;s platform was made by those who know how to make resilient and flexible digital tools.&nbsp;
It is at least in part due to this international perspective that FlavorWiki&rsquo;s platform is so user-friendly and can develop valuable insights from nearly anywhere with an internet connection. The platform is highly streamlined, functional, and mobile-friendly. FlavorWiki does not need to have pre-existing infrastructure in a region in order to conduct qualitative studies there. Via its accessible digital tools, FlavorWiki can quickly identify and recruit participants in the demographics of interest to the researchers and clients. Clients can rest assured that FlavorWiki will be able to generate valuable insights regardless of location.
Today, FlavorWiki boasts an ever-growing network of research professionals spread around the world, along with a digital platform and tools that are optimized to reach and engage with new groups of people. Carefully designed by expert researchers and moderated by people who truly understand the study participants, FlavorWiki&rsquo;s Qualitative Solutions utilize the company&rsquo;s unique traits capabilities to generate powerful insights for their clients.

In strictly quantitative studies of consumer feelings and behaviors, contact is rare between those conducting the research and analysis and those providing the data points in the forms of survey responses. The intent is to let the numbers do the talking. In contrast, the effectiveness of qualitative studies often hinges on the ability of a single moderator to develop a connection with the study participants.

Qualitative Solutions

Competitive advantages are hard to come by in the food retail space where one must contend with the complicated nature of personal taste and companies with decades of experience in the market. That’s why it’s so important to understand what drives consumers to make a purchase. It’s only with thorough insights about consumers that one develops winning strategies, and these insights take a lot of good data, and imaginative use of that data. The Category Appraisal is one of several of FlavorWiki’s services that turn consumer feedback into useful information. The Category Appraisal offers reliable and compelling insights about the purchase drivers in your product category and does so quickly enough to keep you ahead of the curve among your competitors.Just having data about purchase drivers is not enough to make winning innovations in your market. Data will reveal many patterns about the purchase drivers among the consumers providing feedback—and the more data you have, the more patterns you might find—but only some of these patterns will hold true among the rest of the people making up your target market. In a worst-case scenario, a data set can make a conclusion seem totally certain despite not being true at all for the target market as a whole. In a space as competitive as food retail, you can’t afford to investigate the truth of every pattern you might discover in your consumer feedback data. You need a reliable method to filter out the noise and learn about your target market efficiently.With the Category Appraisal, FlavorWiki mobilizes a suite of data science methods, proprietary technology, and expert personnel to make raw consumer feedback useful. The Category Appraisal is a comprehensive, data-driven assessment of several products in order to understand the purchase drivers in that category. It begins with consumer feedback collection via FlavorWiki’s global user base on a large scale. This involves a variety of question types to gather data on consumer demographics, descriptive attributes for the products, and purchase intents, among other data points. This data is then analyzed via machine-learning and several rigorous statistical methods to be communicated in concise and informative reports.This package of services transforms a wealth of data into useful information in several ways. Firstly, FlavorWiki collects better data than do traditional consumer research institutions, leading to more reliable insights. Due to FlavorWiki’s accessible platform and their mobile app, they have been able to cultivate an ever-enlarging global user-base. This means that each data collection push yields large sample sizes that more closely reflect the target market from the start. What’s more, FlavorWiki develops long-term relationships with their users, collecting their feedback on multiple products over time, and so they have more context for the feedback from each user. With more abundant data from the start, any data analysis is more able to reveal useful information.Besides working with more robust data, FlavorWiki’s Category Appraisal offers quality consumer insights with their in-house data science expertise. With procedures such as PCA tests, Penalty Analysis, and Factor Analysis, FlavorWiki zeroes-in on the important variables in the data while filtering out irrelevant and potentially misleading ones. And, with their intuitive and accessible platform, FlavorWiki presents a variety of data visualizations to communicate the stories in the data in ways that stakeholders can understand regardless of their familiarity with data science.Crucially, FlavorWiki’s Category Appraisal does more than give you valuable consumer insights, it also gets them to you quickly. FlavorWiki utilizes a unique model for gathering consumer feedback that both improves the quality of the data, and the rate of data collection. FlavorWiki’s platform can be accessed by anyone with an internet connection or a smart phone, and their platform is designed for simplicity and ease-of-use. These facts make it easy for new users to join and provide whatever kind of feedback FlavorWiki’s client might be looking for. Traditional consumer research has relied on central location consumer panels. These take time to arrange and cannot get nearly as many people as can a platform that is available to people wherever they are. In contrast, FlavorWiki’s Category Appraisal will paint you a comprehensive picture of purchase drivers in the product category with plenty of time to put that knowledge to use.In addition to using an agile model to generate data quickly, FlavorWiki gets you consumer insights faster by making use of its in-house data science expertise. FlavorWiki does not rely on any third party either to get or analyze consumer feedback. They have the relevant expertise and patented software all under the same roof, streamlining the entire process of turning consumer feedback into useful knowledge. For example, FlavorWiki can provide their client with the skeleton of some reports before data collection is closed. When the data collection period does close, the report can be swiftly finalized. Typically, a firm would have to wait until after all the data was collected to begin making a report at all, and their client wouldn’t learn much until they received that report. In comparison, by having data collection and analysis under the same roof, FlavorWiki can give clients a glimpse of the stories the data is telling before the data collection period has even finished and can give them the finalized report much more quickly. All this translates to a much more responsive consumer research process that makes learning about your target market much more efficient.The Category Appraisal equips you with quality insights about the purchase drivers in your product category of interest, and it does so quickly enough to give you the competitive advantage. Mobilizing FlavorWiki’s proprietary software, including machine-learning, and data scientists, the Category Appraisal offers reliable insights about purchase drivers presented in a way that anyone can understand. Just as importantly, FlavorWiki’s streamlined model and lack of need for third party assistance lets them complete the Category Appraisal efficiently. With better information generated more quickly, you will be positioned to navigate the challenges in your market and make winning innovations.

Competitive advantages are hard to come by in the food retail space where one must contend with the complicated nature of personal taste and companies with decades of experience in the market. That’s why it’s so important to understand what drives consumers to make a purchase. It’s only with  thorough insights about consumers that one develops winning strategies, and these insights take a lot of good data, and imaginative use of that data.

Category Appraisal

Reliable information on how consumers feel about a product is difficult to come by in the food industry, and yet it is crucial to the management and health of a brand. Surveys are a straightforward and popular method to develop consumer insights, but getting enough people to respond, and to do so quickly enough for the information to still matter is a tall order. And even then, it takes advanced data analysis techniques and resources to develop many of the most valuable conclusions about consumer behaviors and purchase drivers. Whether for a small business or an established giant in the world of retail food products, these complications can keep quality consumer insights out of reach.FlavorWiki removes the hurdles between you and the information that can help your brand stay competitive with a Post-Launch/Quality Check that reaches and collects data from real customers, and with the expertise to make sense of it. With its uniquely accessible features, FlavorWiki’s advanced data analysis resources, and its highly flexible survey template, the Quality Check will give you the insights to manage your brand and innovate.Designed to lower barriers for consumers to give feedback, FlavorWiki’s Quality Check gauges product performance faster than typical consumer insight resources, which in turn helps you protect your brand. Understanding product performance within a short period of that product’s launch is vital to maintaining a brand image. If the product is performing well, knowing this early allows you to capitalize on that success. You can increase supply to avoid product shortages, or you can ramp up and refine your marketing efforts with greater knowledge of your target demographics and what is motivating their purchases.Conversely, if the product is underperforming, knowing this within a short window of launch will let you take crucial action to protect your brand. A product misfire has consequences beyond lost revenue. An unsatisfying experience with one product under your brand will erode consumer trust in your other products and services. The longer an unsatisfying product remains on the shelves, the more damage your brand can sustain and the more lasting that damage can be. The sooner you are aware of poor product performance, the sooner you can pull or discontinue that product to avert brand damage.Yet, as vital as a timely understanding of product performance is, it is difficult to acquire. Nearly any barrier to completing a survey can be enough to dissuade a consumer, whose time is valuable, from trying at all. Physical surveys involve many steps to return once completed, while many digital surveys can turn away the less technologically savvy. But, with easy-to-use and mobile features, FlavorWiki’s Quality Check is simple and quick to complete, thus generating data on product performance fast enough to capitalize on successes, and to minimize the effects of a product underperformance.Besides arming you with knowledge of product performance within a short window of its launch, FlavorWiki’s Quality Check helps you stay competitive with detailed and advanced consumer insights that you can’t get anywhere else. Combining statistical analysis, machine-learning, and proprietary question templates, FlavorWiki uses the Quality Check to generate much more nuanced and valuable insights than the consumer responses offer at face value. FlavorWiki considers and gives weight to the many variables that effect consumer responses—demographics, location, product pricing, packaging etc.—all at once to identify preference drivers, product satisfaction and performance, and other insights that reveal themselves when viewing the data comprehensively. With the proprietary paired-question methodology, FlavorWiki can even use the Quality Check data to determine purchase drivers within specific sensory attributes. Equipped with this kind of information, you can alter marketing to better target your customers, and even find inspiration for winning innovations in the product itself.The Quality Check itself is also highly customizable, allowing clients to quickly get feedback that directly addresses their concerns and needs. By default, the Quality Check can include the full consumer experience, recording the circumstances of the purchase down to its location on the shelf (if applicable), its price, and its package. Consumers will be prompted to share their product expectations, their tasting experience, and their re-purchase intent by answering a variety of question types including open-end, JAR (“just about right”), multiple choice, image capture, and, for an additional fee, even video capture.FlavorWiki will work with you to determine the specifics of each of these questions, leaving you with a questionnaire that addresses your specific inquiries, while having FlavorWiki’s consumer reach and advanced data analysis. Working together, you can develop a survey that measures a wide variety of metrics from broad to very specific. Want to know how a specific marketing decision might be affecting purchase behavior in a specific demographic? Want to test the waters with some ideas for future product iterations? You can do either or both. And with image and video capture, you give consumers the opportunity to share even more context for their product reactions. This all amounts to more and more useful insights that will give you a competitive edge in the ever-changing food retail industry.Whether it’s by the easy-to-features that make it simple for consumers to give their product feedback, by the advanced data analysis resources that can identify trends in the data you can find on your own, or by the versatility of the questionnaire itself, FlavorWiki’s Quality Check will equip you with the information to protect your brand and to improve your products. With FlavorWiki, you will get reliable feedback from real customers, addressing your specific concerns while also providing a comprehensive view of your product performance. When success is all about seeing what’s coming from around the corner, FlavorWiki’s Quality Check will set you up to take the lead.

Reliable information on how consumers feel about a product is difficult to come by in the food industry, and yet it is crucial to the management and health of a brand. Surveys are a straightforward and popular method to develop consumer insights, but getting enough people to respond, and to do so quickly enough for the information to still matter is a tall order.

Quality Check

In the food retail industry, there is no shortage of competition. Walk down any aisle in the grocery store and you will find several versions of even the most specific ingredients and products available. To break into this crowded space, you have to make your product stand out to consumers as something special and unique. And in order to stand out, you have to understand who your competition is, that is, who you are trying to stand out against. This information can be hard to collect or glean on your own, and the more niche your product, the more difficult reliable insights are to get. With FlavorWiki’s Competitive Benchmarking, you are able to get detailed insights on how your product compares to its direct and indirect competitors. By telling you how your product ranks among its competitors, and by telling you what variables are most responsible for differences in product performance, FlavorWiki’s Competitive Benchmarking will make your marketing and product development more effective, and thus help your business succeed.To make your product a success, you must make it stand apart from its competition in a recognizable and positive aspect. Consumers are bombarded by marketing impressions on a daily basis, especially when shopping. With so many choices vying constantly for their attention, consumers need a product to present a clear advantage over the ones which are otherwise similar. If you want your product to sell more units than it would by sheer luck, you need to clearly communicate what makes your product special to customers.By comparing your product against its direct or indirect competition, FlavorWiki’s Competitive Benchmarking equips you with the insights to ensure your product stands out to consumers and is therefore a success. With the Competitive Benchmarking, a single consumer will evaluate both products one after the other along criteria as specified by the client, after which, they are asked to either state preference or rank the products. FlavorWiki takes several steps to make sure the results accurately reflect how consumers feel about the products. The product surveys are given to consumers in permuted orders to minimize order bias, and the surveys ask the same questions for each product to make them easy to compare.With a unique assortment of statistical analysis methods and cutting-edge technology which includes machine-learning, FlavorWiki is able to accurately determine how your product performs relative to its competitor(s), and, just as importantly, which qualities in each product are most responsible for differences in product performance.Armed with this information, you can much more effectively identify strategies to make your product stand out against its competition, and this is an advantage for several reasons. Firstly, this information is valuable because effective product marketing is too resource-intensive to involve unnecessary guess-work. What makes a product appeal to consumers depends on a complicated mixture of variables that take time and money to evaluate and understand. Even with this understanding there will always be multiple marketing strategies that take more time and money to develop and consider. After all, there are many ways to make a product stand out from the competition. An affordable price point, a catchy slogan, attractive packaging, a delicious recipe—these are just a few examples of the qualities that can make a product leave a consumer with a lasting positive impression. And all of these potential options must then take into account the overall brand identity, business model, and business goals. For all of these reasons, marketing a product well—in a way that identifies its uniqueness to consumers—is expensive.FlavorWiki’s Competitive Benchmark streamlines the marketing process and cuts down the guess-work by identifying which competitors are in closest competition with your product, and which may not be very close at all. It does little to help your product succeed to make sure it appears superior to a product which consumers already prefer much less. It is also possible that a competing product is strongly preferred to yours. Not knowing this, one might underestimate how much effort is needed to close that gap, leading to half-measures that waste your company resources.In contrast, the competitors which are closest in consumer preference are more valuable to set your product apart from. These are the products which consumers struggle to choose between, and thus, could most benefit from seeing a clear reason to choose yours over the other. Because the Benchmark lets you know who the close and distant competitors are, it equips you to develop your product and product marketing more efficiently.FlavorWiki’s Competitive Benchmark also helps you set your product apart from the competition by highlighting the specific weaknesses and strengths of your product relative to its competitors. With FlavorWiki’s unique assortment of analytical methods and technology, they are able to determine what variables are most responsible for differences in consumer preference among the products.Lacking this knowledge, identifying successful marketing strategies is extremely challenging. There is little to prevent you from making changes to the product or its marketing that will actually hurt the product performance and your business. But with such information, you are able to focus your resources on the few qualities in the products making the biggest difference. Perhaps you discover that price is the most important factor for preference for your particular kind of product. Or, maybe the biggest difference is in the design of the packaging, or the style of the advertisements. Whatever the particular variables are, simply knowing which have the largest impact on consumer preference eliminates much of the guess work of marketing, and helps you develop winning innovations.In all, FlavorWiki’s Competitive Benchmark will streamline major aspects of your product marketing and development by giving an objective view of how your product performs against its direct competitors. With a better idea of what is and is not working for consumers, you can make sure your product leaves a uniquely positive impression for lasting success.

In the food retail industry, there is no shortage of competition. Walk down any aisle in the grocery store and you will find several versions of even the most specific ingredients and products available. To break into this crowded space, you have to make your product stand out to consumers as something special and unique.

Competitive Benchmarking

The American grocery store presents customers with half a dozen or more options in almost any product category you can imagine, no matter how niche. There is more competition than ever before, and, at the same time, it is more challenging than ever before to introduce customers to your brand. You can’t just rely on the traditional mediums for advertising and raising brand awareness. Consumers get their media from a huge variety of sources—cable television, streaming platforms, magazines, social media, etc.—and no single outlet will reach every possible customer you might want to introduce to your product. This is all to say, it is more important than ever to target your marketing and your product design if you want your message to be heard.With agile data collection that gets real feedback from real customers with a short turnaround, and their expert statistical and data analysis tools, FlavorWiki helps you get the essential insights you need to understand who your customers are, what they want and need, and how to communicate with them. The Sample Assessment is one of several FlavorWiki services that make this happen. With the Sample Assessment, you will not only receive consumer feedback, but you will also gain, through the power of statistical analysis, a holistic understanding of your product’s strengths and weaknesses, pointing you towards winning innovations.FlavorWiki’s Sample Assessment is an evaluation of several samples or products that are sent directly to a FlavorWiki user. Each is assessed individually, across a variety of possible criteria as determined by the client. The evaluation can address sensorial components such as flavor, texture, and appearance of the product itself. It can also include questions about the packaging, value proposition, purchase intent, and any other aspects on which the client might want feedback. The formats of the questions can also be adjusted to client preference. In these ways, FlavorWiki’s Sample Assessment gives the client access to real consumer feedback that is specific to their points of interest and needs.This curated approach to data collection is useful for the consumer in several ways. Mass marketing, that is, marketing that is meant to address the general population is no longer an effective strategy. All retail, and food retail especially, is more competitive than it has ever been. Between global supply chains and consumer demand for variety, there are more products in each product category vying for consumer attention than ever before. What’s more, people consume a much greater variety of media, meaning that it takes more than a single ad campaign on cable television to reach and attract consumers. For these reasons, marketing needs to be tailored to communicate to a specific group of people.By curating what information the sample assessment collects, it can help you identify your target demographics. Or, if you already have a target demographic for your product, you can work with FlavorWiki to customize the Sample Assessment to address more specific concerns, such as whether or not a recent advertisement campaign has been effective, or if you might want to consider changes to your recipe. Wherever you may be in the process of understanding your consumers and how to communicate with them, the flexibility of the Sample Assessment means that it will always provide you with relevant and useful information.Using the data collected by the Sample Assessment, FlavorWiki applies its proprietary blend of advanced technology and expertise in data analysis to paint a full picture of the relationship between the products and consumers in the targeted demographics. With tools such as machine-learning, FlavorWiki offers valuable insights as specific as the sensory preference drivers, or as general as the measures of product performance and satisfaction. Other elements of this picture that FlavorWiki provides include correlation analysis, penalty analysis, JAR tables, and others according to client needs. FlavorWiki’s powerful statistical analysis and cutting-edge technology tools allows them to turn raw data into consumer insights that explain what motivates consumers to purchase the relevant products.Armed with a comprehensive, data-driven understanding of your product and target demographics, you will be better equipped to make more effective marketing and product design decisions. For example, with a deep understanding of the preference drivers within sensory attributes, the client can understand how elements such as the color of the packaging, or the flavors of the product itself may be affecting the product performance. With such knowledge, you can adjust course by fine tuning the recipe or changing the packaging.Similarly, a correlation analysis may reveal a previously unknown connection between qualities of the product and its commercial performance, pointing you towards rewarding decisions. For example, the Sample Assessment might uncover a strong correlation between age group and preference for spiciness in a product recipe. With this knowledge you would be able to make predictions about how certain recipe changes would affect product sales among specific groups, allowing you to experiment efficiently, as opposed to taking shots in the dark. There are countless specific ways in which a holistic understanding of your target demographics can lead to more effective marketing and winning product design. FlavorWiki’s Sample Assessment is just one of the several FlavorWiki services that offer the valuable consumer insights that can lead to improved product performance.At the end of the day, the success of any given retail product depends on communicating value to customers, and that is only possible when you understand them. FlavorWiki’s Sample Assessment makes that understanding possible. It equips you with direct consumer feedback that is curated specifically to your concerns and interests, and also uses that feedback to draw valid and reliable conclusions about the purchasing behaviors of your target consumer. In the constant pursuit of forging a deeper relationship with your customers, FlavorWiki’s Sample Assessment is an invaluable tool that will help keep you on the path towards winning innovation.

The American grocery store presents customers with half a dozen or more options in almost any product category you can imagine, no matter how niche. There is more competition than ever before, and, at the same time, it is more challenging than ever before to introduce customers to your brand.

FlavorWiki’s Methodology Guides

Learn the details behind FlavorWiki’s Test Design Methodologies: execution tools, types of questions, machine models, statistical analysis outputs and more.

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