"Evaluating your product to ensure it is best in class, leveraging our long experience and sector expertise to deliver detailed, actionable insights."

Whether it is a new, existing or a re-formulated products need to deliver a great consumer experience to maintain and generate repeat sales.

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Maintaining sales to ensure long term profitability requires an understanding of how your product compares to the competition, who direct and indirect competitors are, the size of their market share, and how their brand and products are perceived in the marketplace. 

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At Touchstone we have a wealth of experience in evaluating products across food, drink, personal care and health as well as for restaurants. We offer a bespoke service that covers everything from sourcing competitor product, re-packaging, delivery (including chilled and frozen) and fieldwork – in-home, central location or restaurants. Tests can be blind or branded depending on overall objectives. 

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Responses are collected via a self-completion questionnaire, online or on tablet devices, to capture in-the moment, unprompted responses including pictures and video taken by respondents. By modelling the individual responses across all attributes, we are able to derive and prioritise improvements required to the product, in order to optimise and ensure best in-class status. In addition, by understanding consumer preferences between your product and competitors, we are able to recommend whether additional advertising or on-pack claims can be made. 

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Using our product testing expertise we can provide guidance on: 

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• How well your existing products compare to competitor products  

• Measure the impact of the product performance at launch  

• Detailed guidance to product technologists on optimising products to meet consumer needs  

• Guiding which on-pack product superiority claims that can be made based on product performance 

• Does a new formulation match or better than the performance of the current product 

• Identifying best need states for a product from a consumer perspective  

• Evaluating and identifying any issues with brand, packaging or price 

• Product usage and need states to guide brand communication