Blog - Wirral Sensory Services

What Is Product Testing?

Product testing is essential before launching any new product. Consider it the last dress rehearsal before the big performance. Proper testing ensures that your product is prepared to enter the market in its best shape, whether it’s a brand-new laundry stain remover, vacuum cleaner or a new flavour of soft drink.

Guide To Product Concept Testing

Product concept testing is an early market research technique that increases the likelihood that you will introduce a product that consumers will be eager to buy. Early on, you test a product’s feasibility with its target audience, and you make adjustments to it based on their comments and the data acquired from concept testing.

Personalised Palates: The Role of Sensory Evaluation in Customised Food & Drink Experiences

In today’s consumer-driven landscape, the pursuit of personalised experiences has significantly transformed the way we approach food and beverages. Consumers are no longer satisfied with a one-size-fits-all approach; they seek unique, customised experiences catering to their tastes, dietary requirements, and lifestyle choices.

How Efficacy Testing is a Key Driver in Lean Product Development

In the challenging landscape of product development, efficiency and effectiveness are paramount. To achieve these outcomes, companies must create products that serve their intended purpose and streamline their development process to minimise waste and maximise value.

Smelling Success: Olfactory Perception in Sensory Evaluation

Few of our senses can evoke powerful memories and emotions quite like our sense of smell. From the comforting scent of freshly baked bread to the invigorating aroma of freshly cut grass, our olfactory experiences profoundly impact our lives. It’s no surprise, then, that understanding and harnessing these experiences are critical in product development across various industries. Welcome to the fascinating world of olfactory perception in sensory evaluation, a realm where science and sentiment blend seamlessly to shape how we perceive and interact with products.

Why Brands Should Take a More Holistic Approach to Product Concept Testing

In the multifaceted process of product development, concept testing is a critical stage that often focuses solely on the product itself. However, in the modern consumer landscape, other elements surrounding the product – such as branding, packaging, and marketing strategies – hold significant sway in a product’s overall success. Consequently, as a brand, you need to take a more holistic approach, one that encompasses these vital extra-product elements. So, let’s explore holistic product concept testing in more detail and what it means for you as a brand developing products.

Food Concept Testing: How to Validate Your Next Delicious Idea

Food concept testing is an essential part of the product development process in the food industry. It involves gathering feedback from potential customers to evaluate a new food product’s viability before investing time and resources into its production. By conducting concept testing, food companies can identify potential flaws in their product ideas and make necessary adjustments to ensure they meet consumers’ needs and preferences. This comprehensive guide will examine how you conduct this type of product research. But first, let’s weigh the pros and cons of going down this route before launch.

How Sensory Evaluation Aids in Sustainable Product Development

While you may not have thought it, sensory evaluation and sustainability are actually interconnected aspects of product development that contribute to a product’s overall success and environmental impact. The connection between sensory evaluation and sustainability lies in consumer acceptance, preference, and perception of sustainable products, which all combine to significantly influence their adoption rate and market success.

7 Tips for Conducting Successful Home Use Testing with Consumers

Home use testing is an established market research tool, enabling companies to gather valuable insights into consumer behaviour and preferences in real-life situations. However, companies need to follow best practices to ensure that their testing produces reliable results and accurate insights.

Sensory Evaluation Case Studies: How Top Brands Have Honed Their Products

In the competitive world of consumer goods, sensory evaluation plays a crucial role in developing and refining products that stand out from the crowd. As our senses greatly influence our purchasing decisions, understanding and optimising the sensory attributes of a product is vital for success.

Sensory Evaluation

Wirral Sensory Services are one of the UK’s leading providers of sensory evaluation services. Our expert panellists boast excellent acuity and sensory perception, and our in-house research team can provide a tailored service to suit your needs. But, just in case you’re wondering if sensory evaluation is something your brand might want to pursue, it’s […]

Sensory Testing: The Key to Developing Competitive Products in the Food Industry

Food products must taste good, look appealing, and have the right texture to succeed. That’s why so many brands turn to sensory testing. In short, it helps food manufacturers understand how consumers will perceive their products by evaluating the sensory properties of the food, such as appearance, taste, aroma, and texture.

What Aspects of Food Products are Measured During a Sensory Taste Test?

When developing and marketing food products, ensuring that they appeal to consumers is essential. Many factors will influence a purchasing decision, including the food’s packaging and taste. This is where sensory taste testing comes in. In short, it’s one of the most effective methods to evaluate the sensory characteristics of a food product.

The Importance of Consumer Research in Understanding Customer Needs

Understanding customer needs is crucial for any brand because it helps them develop products that meet the preferences and expectations of their target audience. For instance, if you’re a food or drink brand, conducting consumer research allows you to better identify your customers’ taste preferences, dietary requirements, and lifestyle choices.

5 Ways You Can Utilise the Results of a Sensory Taste Test

Sensory taste tests are a vital part of developing and evaluating food and drink products. They deliver a wide range of insights influencing product decisions, from flavour and taste profiles to texture and appearance.

Consumer Research

All market-leading products depend on consumer research to achieve success. Without consumer feedback, companies can’t make informed decisions about their products either before launch or after they’ve been on the market for a while.

Sensory Taste Test

When developing a market-leading food or beverage product, you must gather all the data you can to ensure success. While you might well spend time on packaging research and get focus groups together to help refine your product, you should also pay attention to flavour and texture.

Sensory Services

Sensory services are key in the development of successful products, particularly in the food and beverage industry. By investigating, measuring, and reporting how consumers interact with products, we can help you to design and improve products to better meet consumer needs.

5 Benefits of Working with Wirral Sensory Services

Research is a vital part of the product development process. From gauging product acceptance to evaluating flavour profiles versus leading competitors, research is an essential tool for any brand looking to succeed in the marketplace.

Which Feedback Methods Are Available with Home Use Product Testing?

Home use product testing offers brands developing products numerous advantages. From observing how a product performs within its intended environment to studying unscripted user behaviour, this type of testing provides brands with a wealth of feedback that can be used to improve product design and functionality.

What Can Your Brand Expect as Part of a Sensory Research Service?

If you’re a startup or established brand looking to secure increased market share, you need to understand your target audience’s preferences. At Wirral Sensory Services, our range of sensory research services help you do just that.

Which Products Are Best Suited to a Home Use Product Testing Service?

Home use product testing is a cornerstone consumer research methodology for many industries. Home use product tests are a type of consumer research in which products are sent to consumers’ homes for them to test in their everyday environment. This allows manufacturers to get feedback on how their products perform in the real world, as opposed to a controlled laboratory setting.

Who is an Efficacy Testing Service Most Useful For? Brands or Consumers?

When trying to prove the effectiveness of a product, using an efficacy testing service is an obvious choice. But who does this type of testing benefit the most? Is it more useful for brands to test their products before releasing them to the public, gathering data, assessing performance, and making changes based on the findings?

Taste Testing Companies

Taste testing is a vital component of consumer research for food and beverage companies. It allows manufacturers to identify potential problems with their products, gauge consumer acceptance, and make necessary adjustments prior to widespread distribution.

Sensory Testing

Sensory testing is a vital component of product development for many leading brands. It allows manufacturers to assess how a product will be perceived by consumers and make necessary adjustments before it hits the market. Sensory testing can provide invaluable insights into consumer preferences and help ensure that products meet or exceed customer expectations.

5 Things You Need to Know About Home Use Product Testing

Home use product testing is an excellent way to develop critical insights about how a product will perform once it hits store shelves. In some cases, it can even revive a failing product by allowing manufacturers to better understand how customers interact with it.

What Packaging Research Reveals About the Colour of Your Brand’s Products

The colour of your packaging plays an integral role in the way consumers perceive your product. In fact, 85% of customers buy products based on colour alone. And yet, many companies overlook the importance of colour in their packaging design.

What Are Some of the Most Common Sensory Testing Methodologies?

Sensory testing plays a vital role in the development of food products. It helps ensure that products are appealing to consumers and that they contain many of the traits of current market leaders.

How Sensory Testing Helps in the Development of Plant-Based Food Products

With a 30-fold increase in the number of vegans over the last 15 years, food brands are now in a race to tap into this ever-growing market. And while there’s been an explosion of plant-based products, from vegan cheese to plant-based meat, the development of plant-based foods replicating the full range of textures and flavours that we associate with animal-based foods is still lacking.

5 Tips for Conducting Consumer Research with Children and Young People

Plenty of home, food, and beverage products focus almost exclusively on the under-18 market. Items, including yoghurts, cereals, and toys, are all heavily advertised to children, so it’s no surprise that companies want to know what young consumers think about their products and how to make them even better.

What Are The Advantages Of Home Use Testing?

Home use testing (HUT), or in-home use testing (iHUT) as it’s often referred to, describes the process of using a product in a target consumer’s home and gathering feedback concerning a product’s performance in its intended setting.

What is a Blind Taste Test?

When conducting consumer testing, blind taste tests are a valuable tool in gathering consumer feedback without being influenced by other factors such as branding, price, packaging etc. In a blind taste test, participants are given products to sample without knowing which brand they are trying. This allows testers to focus purely on the taste, smell, and texture of the product in order to make an unbiased judgement.

Who Carries Out Sensory Testing?

Sensory testing is an integral part of product development in the food and beverage industries. The process helps establish the sensory profile of a product and can identify potential off-flavours or other sensory defects.

5 Elements To Look Out For When Choosing A Consumer Product Testing Company

When carrying out consumer research, the chances are that you’ll need to enlist the services of an experienced consumer testing company to ensure that the process is conducted smoothly and to the highest possible standards. However, with so many different consumer testing companies to choose from, it can be tricky to decipher which one will be the best fit for your brand.

What is Product Optimisation?

No food manufacturer or beverage brand should ever stand still. Even if you currently hold the position of market leader, without continuous and ongoing product optimisation, you will lose the top spot to another brand carrying out this vital exercise.

5 Reasons Why Your Brand Should Commit to Ongoing Product Testing

While sales might be indicative of your product’s performance, how can you really tell if your product is meeting customer expectations and delivering on its promises? Product testing is one of the best ways to dig much deeper into your performance and gain valuable feedback to help you assess and improve your product.

How Home Use Testing Saved One of the World’s Most Successful Products

Back in the early 1990s, the world’s largest consumer goods company, Procter & Gamble, was busy working on a new product. It was a spray that would completely eliminate bad odours. From wet dog stenches to the lingering smell of cigarette smoke, Febreze was meant to become a revolutionary golden-goose product that would bring in billions of dollars of revenue to the company every year. In the end, it did. But only thanks to the intervention of home use testing. So, with that in mind, let’s look at how one of the world’s most successful products nearly didn’t make it.

Should You Ever Rename Your Product?

Renaming a product is something that food and beverage manufacturers consider from time to time. Sometimes it’s the right thing to do. By contrast, there are other circumstances whereby renaming a product is likely to have negative consequences and potential knock-on effects for your wider brand.

Your Quick Guide to Successful Product Claims

Making your product stand out on the shelf is more challenging than ever. With as much as 85% of household shopping derived from repeat purchases, it’s become harder than ever to convince consumers to switch to your food or drink product from their current preferences.

The Four Steps Required for Developing a Winning Product Concept

When developing new products, there’s a massive difference between thinking you have a winning product concept and knowing you do. With extensive product concept testing, you could be pouring significant resources into a project that is doomed from the start.

Why Taste is So Vital for Food Products

Did you know that of 12,000 food product launches across Europe, 76% fail to retain their listing after 12 months? Worse, as many as two-thirds even fail to reach the milestone of 10,000 units sold. If you’re in the final stages of launching a new product or revamping an existing one, those statistics make brutal reading.

Taste Testing Company

When developing food and drink products, taste plays a pivotal role in consumer acceptance. That’s why leading food brands and manufacturers team up with taste testing companies to gather crucial insights into how their products perform within target demographics before investing in production or marketing campaigns.

Sensory Food Testing

Sensory testing (or sensory profiling as it’s often referred to) involves the objective evaluation of food (and beverage) products based on the five senses. Rather than using members of the public, sensory food testing required trained panellists who evaluate products based on sensory factors such as smell and taste.

How To Make Your Product’s Rebrand A Success

Rebranding, renaming or revamping existing products can be a worthwhile endeavour for products in desperate need of a new lease of life or a significant sales boost. But rebranding is not without risk, and getting it wrong can be incredibly costly both in terms of brand reputation and resources spent. Even the biggest brand names in the world have made costly errors before, as we shall now explain.

How Packaging Redesign Blunders Cost These Leading Brands Millions

Packaging research is a crucial component of product development. Yet, this vital phase of branding (and rebranding) is often overlooked, creating enormous issues for the brands that didn’t carry out consumer testing correctly.

The Challenges Of Central Location Testing

Central location testing (CLT) is a vital piece of the puzzle for brands looking to gain consumer insights into their products. CLT is a qualitative market research approach in which research takes place in a specific, controlled environment such as a testing lab, restaurant, shopping center, department store or other suitable locations where the brand wants to have a presence.

Product Concept Testing

Product concept testing is an early market research method that maximises the odds of you launching a product that people want to purchase. You explore the viability of a product with its target consumer early on and improve its development from the feedback and data acquired from the testing.

How Consumer Taste Tests Boost Your Brand’s Product Performance

Consumer testing forms one of the cornerstones underpinning any leading brand’s success. For those competing in the food and beverage industry, consumer taste tests, in particular, provide vital data and insights that can give your brand an edge over the competition. With that in mind, let’s look in more detail at why consumer taste tests often hold the key to success for consumer products.

3 Reasons Why Product Concept Testing is So Important

History is littered with mistakes made by brands launching products without conducting the necessary research. Who can forget the launch of the “New Coke” in the 1980s (which lasted all of two weeks) or the flop that was Google Glass? The latter example proves that even the most innovative of companies can badly miss the mark with their consumers.

What Are the Most Common Types of Food Product Testing?

When bringing a food product to market, there are a whole host of product testing methods you could undertake before reaching the launch stage. But which ones are the most important and therefore used the most? In this post, we’ll take a look at the product testing methods you are most likely to use on your new or reformulated food product.

Why Carry Out Consumer Testing?

Consumer testing is a vital part of developing industry-leading products, yet many fledgling brands try to bring a product to market without conducting any. Even established brands can make the mistake of not thoroughly carrying out consumer testing on a reformulated product and become shocked when the relaunch doesn’t go to plan (remember the “New Coke” disaster of the 1980s?).

What Is The Point Of Product Benchmarking?

Product benchmarking is a vital process that ensures your product is up to scratch. Yet, despite its importance, many brands forgo this vital aspect of consumer research. So with that in mind, let’s examine product benchmarking in more detail and explain why, when executed correctly, it can help your brand deliver a product that is head and shoulders above competitors.

What Are The Different Types Of Central Location Testing?

Central location testing is a vital piece of the puzzle for brands looking to gain consumer insights into their products. They tend to occur in neutral environments such as shopping centres, department stores, or other locations where the brand wants to have a presence.

3 Reasons You Should Put Your Product Through Efficacy Testing

According to researchers, food manufacturers waste more than £30.4 billion a year on failed product launches. However, thorough market research methods, such as central location testing and packaging research, can reduce the likelihood of failing with a new product launch.

What Are the Advantages of Central Location Testing?

What Is Sensory Research?

Why Choose Home Use Product Testing?

Taste Testing

Central Location Testing

Sensory Profiling

How Does Sensory Research Differ from Consumer Research?

Food Tasting Research: What’s Involved?

What Are Some of the Different Types of Consumer Testing?

Central Location Testing vs Home Use Testing: Which is Right for Your Brand?

Which Products Benefit From Efficacy Testing

Sensory Profiling vs Taste Testing: What’s the Difference?

How to Create Industry-Leading Products With Product Optimisation

Every year thousands of products are introduced to the UK market, but less than 3% of those products will enjoy a successful launch. To overcome the barriers to entry in mature markets, companies have had to find innovative ways to stand out from the crowded grocery store shelf.

Prove Your Product’s Effectiveness with Efficacy Testing

Before launching a functional product, such as deodorant, it is essential to measure its effectiveness. Measuring a functional product’s level of efficacy allows brands to make substantive claims about their product’s performance supported by scientific research.

What Is Central Location Testing?

What Are Some Of The Different Research Methods Involved In Food Testing?

Food testing is an essential part of the successful launch of any new food product. Market research is essential for food companies because this is one of the most competitive consumer markets.