Abstract:

The increasing opportunities for development of cross-border business and the growing requirement for the major international client companies to rationalise their brands across the world has put renewed demands on international market research techniques, especially when it comes to product testing. This paper describes how the particular needs of the product development decision makers in the client companies can best be met by using a combination of sensory research and market research techniques. The paper considers the shortcomings of traditional product testing techniques for international projects and highlights how the language gap between consumers from different countries, the product developer and the marketeer can be successfully bridged, leading to successful product optimisation and rationalisation. Aspects covering consumers' difficulty to verbalise, limited vocabulary, inconsistent vocabulary, lack of sensitivity, misunderstanding of attributes and halo effect are included. The problems of inter-country translation and how these can be overcome are also covered. The use of sensory panels and the principles of quantitative descriptive analysis to produce product profiles are described. How this sensory information is linked with quantitative market research data from international countries using preference mapping techniques is explained. Case histories from the confectionery, fuel and flavour industries demonstrating the success of these techniques in overcoming the problems are shown. The fuel study covered the following countries: Chile, Malaysia, Hong Kong, France and UK, and looked at rationalising the odour of a particular brand of diesel fuel. The confectionery study was conducted in France, Germany and UK, and was required to rationalise the flavour and texture of a major brand of chocolate. The flavour project looked at the optimisation of a European brand of toothpaste and the study covered Spain, France, Germany and UK