FMCG Brands: 5 Questions to Ask Your Consumers

In a constantly evolving market, FMCG brands are no exception and also face numerous challenges: the growth of e-commerce, discount retailers, and the proliferation of niche brands are among them. Consumer expectations, increasingly demanding, have also evolved significantly, placing the environmental, social, and societal impacts of their purchases at the forefront of their concerns.

In the face of these changes, it is crucial for FMCG brands to understand their audience's needs in detail by gathering relevant and actionable insights. What are the 5 key questions to ask your consumers in your upcoming surveys? And what are the various types of studies that can provide the answers? This is what we will explore in this article!

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1. Do Consumers Know You?

How do consumers perceive your brand and products compared to your competitors? What is your position in the market?

Not all FMCG brands have the advantage of enjoying the brand recognition of Coca Cola, Nespresso, or Ferrero Rocher, three players who have successfully established an instantly recognizable brand image. Better understanding your positioning and buyer profiles is essential for smarter communication about your products.

‍The Brand Awareness Survey

This type of consumer study is the ideal tool to answer these questions. It allows for a thorough assessment and understanding of strengths and weaknesses within a competitive market. Specifically, an awareness study aims to measure your brand awareness through a spontaneous awareness question (without showing a list containing your brand name) and then an aided awareness question (based on a list). It will also enable you to identify the channels that build your brand's recognition, determine the image held by those familiar with it, and precisely define the profile of your affinity targets. Valuable insights to refine your communication strategy!

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2. What Are Your Target's True Needs?

What is your audience's daily life like? What behaviors and habits shape their needs and guide their consumption?

To capture new market shares and compete with niche brands, these insights must play a central role in the development of your next concept.

The Success of Niche Brands

The success of companies focusing on a niche market is not insignificant. Their smaller size and proximity to consumers on social media allow them to adapt to their environment quickly and flexibly. Brands like HappyVore or Heura Foods have successfully entered supermarket shelves by offering vegetarian products based on plant-based meat. A promising market that major brands were slow to seize.

The Usage and Attitudes Study

‍The Usage and Attitudes Study allows you to deepen your understanding of your audience by creating a precise portrait of your personas. Niche targets, unfortunately very difficult, if not impossible, to recruit via traditional survey methodologies, become accessible through social media. This gives you the opportunity to adjust your commercial strategy and also succeed in entering niche markets! 😉

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3. Do Consumers Appreciate Your Next Concept?

What is your product's market potential? Which version will best meet your target audience's expectations?

Understanding consumer opinion prior to the commercialization of a new concept is essential to achieve the best market penetration rate.

Concept testing

This type of consumer study occurs prior to commercialization and easily identifies its strengths and weaknesses for your target population. If you are deliberating between several concepts for market launch, these will be randomly presented to identical groups of individuals to clearly identify the most successful version. This will provide you with all the necessary insights to better understand your concept's potential, optimize its positioning, and identify the most relevant marketing channels!

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4. Have consumers seen your ad (online or offline)?

How are your campaigns perceived and what effects do they have on your brand image and sales?

Thanks to your audiences and their authentic opinions, you will be able to identify areas for improvement for your future campaigns, and ultimately optimize your advertising and media investments.

Advertising post-testing

This type of survey is conducted after your campaign's broadcast and effectively measures the impact of your communications, whether displayed in public spaces or disseminated online. For physical advertising, the study is conducted on respondents targeted locally and precisely within the display areas of your outdoor advertising campaign. Advertising post-testing also helps identify the consumer profiles most aligned with your campaign and the offer in question. To conduct an even more in-depth analysis, this study format can be complemented by a pre-test to collect baseline data for comparison (before and after the campaign).

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5. Are consumers satisfied with your offering?

Consumers often believe that FMCG brands conduct overly impersonal marketing. Conducting a survey to determine your buyers' satisfaction level with your product will enable your brand to strengthen its promotional strategy, thereby avoiding this criticism!

By gaining insights into your offering's strengths, you will be able to determine the most effective communication strategy. For instance, Michel & Augustin, in their latest entirely in-house produced campaign, featured their own employees. An ingenious idea to reinforce the artisanal and consumer-centric spirit that contributed to the brand's success!

Satisfaction survey

The satisfaction survey is highly valuable for enhancing your understanding of consumer expectations, and thus enabling you to offer them solutions even more aligned with their future needs. The NPS (Net Promoter Score), which assesses targeted users' intent to recommend your offering, is one of the indicators we utilize in this type of consumer study. Ultimately, the satisfaction survey is essential for all FMCG brands aiming to advance their commercial strategy!

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Conclusion

With 4.6 billion active users worldwide, social media platforms are now the optimal arena for surveying your audience and conducting all your consumer studies. These platforms enable us to recruit respondents with diverse profiles, from the broadest to the most niche targets, who are not accustomed to surveys. With our methodology, designed from the outset for mobile use, respondents no longer feel like they are filling out a questionnaire but rather participating in a conversation. All these elements guarantee the authenticity of responses, and thus the generation of relevant insights for your brand!

To learn more about the different types of consumer studies we offer, feel free to download our Guide.

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