Focus Groups, Product Tests, and Buyer Research with Recruited Consumers
SIS recruits consumer respondents by demographics, purchase behavior, and category usage, then puts them in a room with your product. Focus groups at our Flatiron District facility. Taste tests in our test kitchen. Central location tests with 150 to 500 respondents. Home-use studies. Online surveys across 135 countries.
The research answers a specific question about a specific product for a specific buyer segment. Clients include Pfizer, Dell, Colgate-Palmolive, and leading CPG, food and beverage, and personal care brands.
Six Consumer Research Methods
Each method starts with a screener questionnaire that defines who qualifies. SIS recruits from a national respondent database. Bilingual moderators on staff in Spanish, Mandarin, and German.
Consumer Focus Groups
Six to eight recruited respondents discuss a product category, brand, packaging concept, or advertising idea under the direction of an SIS moderator. Sessions run at our NYC facility (HD video, one-way mirror, live streaming) or online via video platform. SIS writes the screener, develops the discussion guide with projective techniques and laddering sequences, moderates the session, and delivers a thematic analysis of verbatim transcripts.
Taste Tests and Sensory Evaluations
Respondents evaluate food, beverage, and personal care products in our Flatiron District test kitchen under controlled temperature, lighting, and serving conditions. Sequential monadic designs reduce comparison bias. Rating instruments include 9-point hedonic scales for overall liking and JAR scales for specific attributes. Triangle tests detect whether consumers notice a formulation change. Recent work: sparkling water flavor comparison, snack reformulation, moisturizer texture assessment.
Ethnographic Home Visits
SIS researchers visit consumers in their homes to observe how products are stored, used, and integrated into daily routines. Research captures behaviors that respondents cannot self-report in a survey: how they organize a refrigerator, which products sit unused, how they actually apply a skincare routine versus how they describe it. Ethnographic findings identify product design and packaging opportunities that quantitative research alone misses.
Packaging and Shelf Simulation
SIS builds simulated shelf sets at our facility to test packaging visibility, findability, and preference against competitive products. Eye-tracking equipment measures first fixation, dwell time, and pick-up rate. Research covers primary and secondary packaging, label hierarchy, and regulatory compliance elements (FDA nutrition facts, EU allergen declarations). Findings show whether the package gets noticed, gets picked up, and gets chosen in a realistic purchase context.
Usability and Digital Experience Testing
Respondents interact with apps, websites, e-commerce platforms, and connected device interfaces at our facility or remotely. SIS moderators observe task completion, navigation errors, hesitation points, and abandonment triggers through screen recording and think-aloud protocols. Research identifies where the experience breaks down and why. Recent consumer UX work has covered mobile banking apps, grocery delivery platforms, and smart home device setup flows.
Quantitative Surveys and Segmentation
SIS designs and fields online and mobile surveys to quantify attitudes, purchase intent, brand awareness, and satisfaction across consumer segments. Segmentation analysis groups consumers by behavioral, attitudinal, and needs-based variables rather than demographics alone. Conjoint analysis determines which product features and price points drive choice. SIS handles instrument design, programming, fielding, statistical analysis, and reporting as a single engagement across 135 countries.
Consumer Research Built on Primary Evidence
SIS does not resell syndicated consumer data. Every finding comes from recruited respondents who match the category, segment, and purchase behavior the study requires. The output is a recommendation tied to a specific product, packaging, or launch decision.
Coded verbatim transcripts organized by theme, with participant quotes mapped to specific attitudes and decision drivers. The report identifies which product attributes, messaging angles, or packaging elements resonated and why. Brand managers bring these findings directly into creative briefings and product development meetings.
Hedonic ratings, JAR diagnostics with penalty analysis, and paired comparison results at 90% or 95% confidence. The report identifies the winning formulation, flavor, texture, or packaging variant and quantifies how much each off-target attribute reduces overall liking. R&D teams use penalty analysis to prioritize reformulation by impact.
Photographic and video documentation of real consumer behavior in home environments. Findings map the gap between self-reported usage (what consumers say they do) and observed behavior (what they actually do). Product and packaging teams use these insights to redesign for how products are stored, opened, dispensed, and discarded in practice.
Needs-based consumer segments with distinct attitudes, behaviors, and purchase drivers. Conjoint-derived feature/price tradeoff models that show which product configurations maximize purchase intent by segment. Van Westendorp optimal price points and acceptable price ranges calibrated to the competitive category. Marketing teams use segmentation to target media. Product teams use conjoint to configure SKUs.
THE SIS DIFFERENCE
Our service offerings include:
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