Case Study
Category Leader Optimizes Product to Reduce Costs
overview
A non-prescription pain relief brand wanted to explore potential product changes they could successfully make to save costs while still maintaining their status as a category leader. They proposed multiple features with various levels of change, seeking to discern the performance of each and their optimal combinations.
C+R Research built a discrete choice exercise to understand feature importance and identify an ideal product combination.
THE PROBLEM
How to Reconfigure Product Features to Reduce Costs
Inflation and continued marketplace changes from COVID have put pressure on the category leader of non-prescription pain relief products to look for costs savings so increased costs are not passed to the retailer or the consumer.
Specifically, the brand wanted to understand:
- Features most important when purchasing the category
- The impact of changing various aspects of the packaging, claims and price on consumers’ interest in the product
- The ideal product combination
- How much consumers are willing to pay
OUR APPROACH
Discrete Choice Exercise Covers All Objectives
C+R developed an online survey with a built-in discrete choice conjoint exercise in order to derive preference, attribute importance, utility scores and share of preference. The team recruited category consumers who were users of the client’s brand, as well as competitive brands.
For the discrete choice exercise, respondents were shown twelve different screens, each with two different product combinations. On each screen, they were instructed to choose which product they were more likely to purchase.
The result
Simulator Provides What-if Scenarios – Leading to Confident Decisions
This research identified the relative importance of each of the features tested, as well as feature aspects that garnered the most impact on product selection. With this information, we were able to identify the optimal product combination that yielded the highest share of preference and related revenue. In order for the client to meet its objective of cutting costs, our Advanced Analytics team provided an Excel-based simulator to explore “what if” scenarios so that their product development and finance teams could determine which features produced the highest cost savings, while also maintaining the share and revenue that were needed. The simulator not only addresses the current objective at hand but remains an invaluable tool for client teams across the organization to continue to conduct “what if” scenarios, especially when it comes to future innovation.
proven experience
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