Mixing Emotional and Rational

Business Challenge

Our Client – a major marketer of individual frozen meals – wanted to assess which product claims (of the nearly 100 tested) would most encourage consumer purchase. Experience with this type of research in the past had taught this client to ask for a solution that would help avoid the “expected research outcome” – that is, when rational claims (“made with fresh vegetables”) are chosen over emotional claims (“made with the highest quality ingredients”) in the testing arena, but don’t work as in hard selling the product.

TRC’s Solution

TRC helped our client create a testing scenario of “virtual products” with no prices, only descriptions containing a mix of both rational and emotional claims. This created a more gut-feel choice experience for participants. Our study leveraged discrete choice to ask respondents to choose the product they liked best in each set. This approach more closely mirrors what happens in the real world and therefore provides better answers.

Successful Results Implementation

Through this approach, we were able to clearly rank the preferred order of claims for our client and, as an added bonus, demonstrate the impact of emotional claims on choice. This was a change from traditional research methods that tend to be biased towards rational statements.