Deciding which health promise should lead a new yogurt

The question

The client already had an early concept for a yogurt in a new format, and it had been through a first quantitative screen.

Before the next test, the global and local teams wanted sharper concept routes, each built on a benefit that mattered to people in the market. They also needed to know whether the product as it stood could deliver the promise it would make.

Our approach

We developed the promise and the product side by side, with two kinds of consumer.

Consumers who knew a lot about nutrition, and could talk about it well, helped build the benefits, reasons to believe and ingredients the concepts were made from. Mainstream consumers then reacted to each benefit, so the routes reflected more than the most engaged voices.

People also tasted early prototypes and compared pack formats, so we could judge whether the product would live up to each promise.

The global and local teams worked alongside us throughout, as the concepts were rewritten and narrowed with consumers round by round. The client’s early concept stayed in as a control.

What the team came away with

The teams had concept routes refined for the quantitative test, in the local language with English back-translations.

Alongside them came product guidance from the prototype tastings and a qualitative read on price. How widely each route would appeal was a question for the quantitative test the routes were written for.