Why is Sensory Testing Important?

It doesn’t matter whether you are a start-up or a superbrand, sensory research and testing can help your company gain valuable knowledge that will help you to improve your product. Thorough sensory research can not only establish exactly where your product fits in to the marketplace, it can also help you to refine your product too.

With the help of sensory testing UK companies can check the effectiveness of any product changes before the item hits the shelves. Gaining this insight at the earliest stage possible will help you to make any alterations necessary to give your product maximum impact when it launches. Being able to pre-empt what a large proportion of consumers like or dislike about your product enables you to market to your target audience much more effectively than if you had done no sensory research whatsoever. Knowing what your customers want from your product can make all of the difference when it comes to effective marketing, and targeting a specific audience means that your next campaign will be far more cost-effective.

Sensory testing can be vitally important for existing products too. It may be that you want to change the recipe according to trends or statistical data gathered elsewhere. It could be that you would like to add a new flavour to an already established range of products, whatever the reason, sensory research is imperative.

Even the slightest tweak can change the way consumers perceive a brand so it is hugely important to know whether any changes that you intend to make will affect the way your customer sees your product. For example, new nutritional studies are being released on a regular basis informing the public that they should be eating less salt and sugar than they are currently. Obviously, with such high public awareness a brand that is perceived as being high in either of these ingredients could suffer at the checkouts. Performing sensory research would allow the company in question to test its new low sugar or salt recipe prior to launch in order to see just how much of difference in taste the consumer is aware of. This will help to build a profile of each product tested and the recipe can be adjusted accordingly.

The more a company can find out about its products the better equipped it will be when it comes to marketing that item. Sensory testing can help you to get inside the mind of your customer, giving you valuable insight into how they perceive your product through their primary senses. Using a combination of the five main senses of taste, touch, sight, sound and smell we build subconscious loyalties to brands. Sensory testing will help you to unlock exactly what it is that endears individual consumers to certain things about your product, invaluable to any successful launch or re-launch.