It seems nearly every sector of the economy is navigating economic uncertainty at this moment, and the ground is shifting fast in the world of consumer packaged goods (CPG) in particular. Tariffs shift supply chains, inflation alters consumer spending habits, and the market we knew yesterday isn’t the market we’re competing in today.
It’s a moment defined by uncertainty, CPG marketing teams have a choice. Dig in and gain an updated understanding of the market and consumers, or “wait it out.”
The problem with waiting it out is that a) when do you stop waiting? And b) you’re continuing to invest time and money in strategies that are grounded in an outdated understanding of the state of play.
As a strategic market research firm, we see this hesitation as the single biggest threat to brand health and long-term growth. The landscape is fundamentally changing. If you “wait it out,” you may never be able to catch up to the market and your customers.
Gaining Strategic Advantage through CPG Market Research
So how do you update your understanding of your market and consumers in a time of uncertainty?
First, start with the data you have and what you know. Most CPG brands have access to copious amounts of data they collect from their customers, which helps provide a basic understanding of customer demographics as well as online and purchasing behaviors. There’s also third-party data you can buy or can access for free–think syndicated research reports, or datasets published by the US government.
This is a great starting point, but it doesn’t get us far enough. We may know our customer demographics and some of their behaviors, but we don’t know them as people. We don’t know the motivations, the fears, the unmet needs that drive their behavior. What’s more, we don’t know who else is in our market that we’re not currently capturing but could.
And if we only supplement these datapoints with other existing data—the data we buy, or the public data we feed into our AI tools—we are working with the same fuel as our competitors.
That’s where primary research comes in. It allows you to build a competitive moat around your brand, by giving you an understanding of your market that your competitors don’t have.
How to Conduct CPG Market Research
So how, more specifically, can primary research help you navigate through and win during these uncertain times? Where you should focus your efforts will depend on your business–it’s something we often talk through with prospective clients on discovery calls–but here are a couple of common ways in which CPG marketing teams are leveraging strategic market research right now.
Custom market segmentation
Big Data can tell us a lot about our customers. Their age, their gender, what they click, what they buy, and when. And with the democratization of AI tools, it’s getting easier to navigate all this data. But Big Data misses the emotional reality of a person lying beneath that surface. Primary research helps us close this gap. It allows us to go beyond the basics of what we know, and dig deeper into who these people are, how they view themselves and the world, and what motivates their behavior.
During times of major change, like now, it’s critical to have an understanding of how your customers view themselves and the world. At Campos, when a client is looking to gain this more nuanced level of understanding, we often start with a segmentation survey. For those of you who are unfamiliar, a segmentation survey allows us to break a market into distinct subgroups or segments and build out robust profiles and personas for each segment. This data also allows us to make recommendations for which segments to target for growth, why, and how.
The idea behind primary segmentation research like this is that we as marketers need to go beyond pure demographic and behavioral targeting. That approach assumes the most important variables in your category is a given demographic characteristic or grouping of characteristics, which is often not true and leaves you with a segment that is too large and heterogeneous to efficiently market to.
A segmentation study combines demographic characteristics with category specific motivations, behaviors, and psychographics, which results in really rich, robust and attitudinally-driven segments.
Refreshing brand strategy
Strong brands are built on a foundation of research–they are intentionally crafted to resonate with consumers and do so in a way that differentiates the brand from competitors. So it’s essential to take the time to step back and view your brand strategy with a critical lens during times of uncertainty like this. It’s highly likely the ground has shifted in ways that should impact how you position your brand to consumers.
At Campos, when we’re working to refresh a client’s brand strategy, primary consumer research is always an essential element of our process. This is how we build the competitive “moat” mentioned earlier. We work with our clients to identify our target audiences, and then we engage directly with them to identify a core motivation (or motivations) that the brand can tap into to attract customers and generate loyalty.
These consumer insights, along with insights from competitive research and internal discovery research with a client, are the building blocks of brand strategy development.
New product development
At a time like now, innovation can feel like a big gamble. But it’s also when the biggest market gaps emerge. We help our clients develop and test new concepts to validate their potential and ensure your R&D investment is focused on products with genuine demand.
Campos does all kinds of product development research, from ethnographic observation to inform the solution brainstorm process to in-home user testing of prototypes. But one of our favorite kinds of new product research is conjoint testing.
Conjoint testing is a quantitative market research method that uncovers what product categories and features consumers value most by forcing them to make trade-offs, just like they do in a real store aisle.
In reality, customers rarely find the perfect product. They have to choose: Do I want the cheaper price OR the premium organic ingredients? Do I prefer the larger size OR the sustainable packaging?
Conjoint testing mathematically measures the “utility” (or value) a consumer places on each individual product feature when forced to choose between competing product options.
As a result, we use this data to help CPG product teams design the optimal product “bundle” that maximizes consumer preference and, ultimately, market share and revenue.
Package Testing
Just as it’s critical to develop and pressure test new products with target consumers before launch, it’s essential to test packaging. Your packaging is often the last, best chance you have to influence a consumer at the point of purchase, whether that’s on a physical store shelf or a digital retail screen. Package testing research is how you ensure that this final sales “pitch” is effective.
There are many ways in which we test packages for our clients, but often we’re testing how it performs visually. We assess the degree to which each package option stands out to consumers, how well each package communicates what we want it to communicate, and how motivating they find the packaging to be.
Sometimes we test actual package performance as well. Is it easy to open, close, and reseal (if applicable)? Are instructions easy to read and understand? And so on.
Pricing research
Right now, many consumers are more cost-conscious than ever, so it’s critical for CPG brands to know exactly what price points are sustainable and what value they need to deliver to justify that price.
Guessing how to price a product is one of the riskiest behaviors we see in the CPG space. Using proven methodologies like, like Van Westendorp’s Price Sensitivity Meter or the Gabor-Granger method, we help you find that sweet spot: the price point that protects your margins without alienating your consumer.
From Data Points to Strategic Advantage
You don’t need another 200-slide deck summarizing survey responses. You need clarity. You need a strategy
Many CPG brands are used to partnering with firms that simply “data dump.” They give you all the data they’ve collected but leave you to figure out what it means for your business.
At Campos, we are different. We don’t sell methodologies—we sell solutions.
- We Are Consultative: We listen to your business goals first. We don’t try to shoehorn you into a templated study. Our custom approach ensures every research dollar spent directly addresses a strategic gap.
- We Are Collaborative: We work alongside your internal teams, making sure the research is aligned with your goals and informed by your expertise.
- We Are Strategic: We push ourselves to go beyond the obvious. Our reports are clear, concise, and focused on the implications of the findings. We don’t just show you what happened; we explain why it matters and what you should do next.
The CPG brands that will thrive in this current landscape won’t be the ones who sit on the sidelines. They’ll be the ones who double down on understanding their consumers. They will use strategic primary research to gain an advantage—not just reacting to the market, but shaping their own path forward.
Ready to stop guessing? Contact us today to set up a discovery meeting to talk through how we can get you that strategic advantage.
