Product optimisation represents a critical process for food, beverage, and consumer goods brands looking to maintain or grow their market position. With only about one in five new products achieving successful launches in the UK market, understanding how to effectively optimise your products can significantly increase your chances of success.
At Wirral Sensory Services, we regularly field questions about the product optimisation process. Here, we’ve compiled answers to the most common queries to help you understand how this vital research approach could benefit your brand.
What Is Product Optimisation and Why Does It Matter?
Product optimisation refers to the systematic process of researching and improving a product to enhance its appeal to target consumers. This approach applies scientific methodologies to identify exactly what drives consumer preference and how your product can be refined to better meet those preferences.
For established brands, product optimisation helps you maintain your market position against increasingly innovative competitors. The marketplace never stands still, with competitors constantly looking for ways to improve their offerings and attract more customers. Without ongoing optimisation, even market-leading products can gradually lose their competitive edge.
For new product development, optimisation significantly increases your chances of success by ensuring your product truly meets consumer needs before full-scale launch.
However, the impact of effective product optimisation extends far beyond immediate sales performance, often translating into long-term brand strength. After all, continually delivering products that meet or exceed customer expectations is likely to build that all-important trust and loyalty that provides lasting commercial value.
How Does the Product Optimisation Process Work?
The most effective product optimisation (usually, but not always) combines two complementary research methodologies: sensory profiling and consumer taste testing. There may be other methodologies used, such as consumer acceptance testing, but those two often form the backbone of any optimisation efforts.
Sensory profiling involves trained experts evaluating your product against specific sensory parameters to create a detailed profile. This objective assessment identifies exactly what sensory characteristics your product delivers, providing a precise technical understanding of your offering.
Consumer taste testing involves having your target market sample and evaluate your product. This reveals which aspects of your product resonate with consumers and which might benefit from refinement.
When these two methodologies are combined, the magic happens. You can identify not just what consumers prefer, but specifically why they prefer it. This powerful insight allows you to precisely target product improvements for maximum impact.
For instance, a popcorn manufacturer we worked with provides an excellent example. Through sensory profiling, we identified 26 key sensory attributes that defined their product category. Consumer taste testing revealed which of these attributes most strongly influenced preference. Armed with this insight, the brand created a “gold standard” product that significantly outperformed competitors, driving substantial sales growth.
When Is the Right Time to Conduct Product Optimisation?
Product optimisation delivers value at multiple stages of the product life cycle, though many companies miss key opportunities by limiting when they apply this approach.
During new product development, optimisation helps refine concepts before significant manufacturing investment. This early-stage application can prevent costly mistakes and significantly increase launch success rates. Many of our clients use this approach to validate and refine promising concepts before committing to full-scale production.
For established products facing increasing competition, optimisation offers a path to maintaining or regaining market leadership. We often work with brands that have noticed a gradual sales decline to identify how their products can be refreshed to better match evolving consumer preferences.
Following ingredient or manufacturing changes, optimisation ensures your product maintains its appeal despite necessary modifications. When supply chain issues, cost pressures, or regulatory requirements force changes, optimisation research can also help to ensure these changes don’t negatively impact consumer acceptance.
In truth, product optimisation should be viewed as an ongoing process rather than a one-time event. Markets and consumer preferences constantly evolve, and your products need to evolve with them.
Which Product Elements Can Be Optimised?
Product optimisation can address virtually any aspect of your offering that influences consumer perception and preference. However, it’s sensory characteristics that often form the core of optimisation efforts.
For food and beverage products, these include flavour profile, texture, aroma, appearance, and mouthfeel. Our research can identify which specific sensory attributes drive preference in your category and how your product performs against these key drivers.
Recipe formulation optimisation helps you deliver preferred sensory characteristics while managing production considerations. This might involve adjusting ingredient levels, exploring alternative ingredients, or refining processing methods to achieve desired outcomes.
Another approach might involve cost optimisation, which identifies opportunities to maintain or improve consumer acceptance while reducing production costs.
And don’t forget that packaging elements can also benefit from optimisation research. From functional aspects like ease of opening to visual elements that communicate quality, packaging plays a crucial role in overall product performance.
The most successful product optimisation programmes typically address multiple elements simultaneously, creating a holistic approach to product improvement.
How Can You Measure the Success of Product Optimisation?
Effective product optimisation delivers measurable benefits that justify the investment in research. Without clear metrics, it’s difficult to quantify the value this process brings to your brand. Fortunately, several established measures can help you track improvement and demonstrate return on investment.
The most valuable success metrics for product optimisation include:
- Consumer preference scores – These provide direct evidence of improvement in product appeal, showing how optimised products compare to previous versions or competitor offerings. Many of our clients see preference score increases of 15-25% through effective optimisation work.
- Purchase intent metrics – These translate preference into commercial potential, helping predict how optimisation will impact real-world sales performance.
- Sensory profile alignment – This technical measure shows how closely your product matches identified “gold standard” characteristics, helping track progress toward sensory targets that drive consumer preference.
- Market performance indicators – Sales growth, market share gains, and increased repeat purchase rates ultimately provide the most important validation of optimisation success. These real-world outcomes demonstrate the commercial impact of your optimisation efforts.
- Cost efficiency improvements – Many clients track savings achieved through optimisation, particularly when ingredient usage has been made more efficient without compromising consumer acceptance.
Tracking these metrics throughout your optimisation journey allows you to clearly demonstrate the value of this research approach and justify continued investment in product improvement.
How Can Wirral Sensory Services Support Your Product Optimisation?
At Wirral Sensory Services, we’ve been helping brands optimise their products for over 25 years. Our approach combines rigorous methodology with a practical commercial focus.
Our trained sensory panel provides precise, consistent evaluations that identify subtle product differences untrained participants might miss. This focused approach delivers reliable results while controlling costs by eliminating the variability found in larger, untrained panels.
Meanwhile, our consumer recruitment capability ensures your products are evaluated by the right target audience. With one of the UK’s largest taster databases, we can quickly assemble panels that match your specific demographic requirements.
Our analytical approach identifies which specific product attributes truly drive consumer acceptance, allowing you to focus resources on changes that will have the greatest impact. This data-driven method has helped numerous clients create their category’s “gold standard” product.
Better yet, our practical recommendations translate complex research findings into clear action steps for your development team. We focus on providing guidance that acknowledges commercial realities while maximising consumer appeal.
If you’re interested in exploring how product optimisation could benefit your brand, we’d welcome the opportunity to discuss your specific needs. Contact our team on +44 (0)151 346 2999 or email info@wssintl.com to start a conversation about improving your product’s market performance.
