The challenge
We were asked by our client, a global confectionary brand, to help them understand how influential the new nutritional grading system would be across their categories. They wanted to know if it would change consumer behaviour and purchasing habits, and if so, why?
What we did
Fieldwork was conducted in France and Germany, where we pre-recruited participants who would consider purchasing the client’s product. We did in-depth interviews with participants and conducted facial coding on their responses to understand both their explicit and implicit responses.
What we found out
- Colour contrast and visual noise play a big role in how attention–grabbing the score is.
- Shoppers' implicit reactions often told us more than their explicit responses. Shoppers frequently displayed strong negative implicit reactions to bad scores, even when they rationalised that they were not concerned.
- Shoppers still need more help understanding the scoring system. Whilst health concerns are always present, grading systems are not always well understood.
Our recommend- ations
Once the fieldwork and analysis were completed, we delivered an in-depth debrief to the client with the wider team.
Client testimonial
"We are extremely happy with Spark Emotions response to our complex and open brief. Using their expertise in behavioural psychology & implicit research tools, they provided intelligent, actionable insights across multiple categories which helped build a consumer-centric response to a key business question"
David Fenning - Consumer Sciences
