One Step Ahead With Consumer Testing

 

By Anne Bak Nielsen, Danish Crown

 

Producing pork is an old trade and has a reputation for being old fashioned. However, it is also a dynamic business which constantly has to adapt and produce according to customer and consumer requirements. Furthermore it is a very competitive business and one where market terms can be particularly hard. This makes the business somewhat contradictive and very challenging.

 

At Danish Crown we are aware of this and do our very best to honour the trade but at the same time adapt to our surroundings.

A new way of thinking now influences the organisation and this old trade has become much less traditional and much more contemporary. Now focus is more and more on sharing knowledge and obtaining new ways and ideas from other businesses, universities, collaborators etc.

 

It is mainly because of these factors that we have joined the Q-PorkChains project Module I- Consumer and Market Analysis. It is a new way of learning and thinking.

By being part of a big international project like Q-PorkChains, and working together with universities and other business associates, we as a company expect to gain new and useful knowledge, which we not only can use in this particular project but also in the future when working with product development.

 

In the aim of analysing the consumers "behaviour and willingness-to-pay" we kick-started with a brain storming session in February 2009. The day was intense and exciting. Our objective was to produce 70 new product ideas by the end of the session.

 

 

After going through the process we had surpassed our target number of ideas. Once we realised that generating ideas was not problematic we turned to the daunting task of reducing our 70+ ideas to 12.

 

The 12 ideas were chosen and full of optimism we were now ready to take these ideas to the next level.

 

The next part of the process was producing concept descriptions for our ideas. The 12 ideas had meanwhile been reduced to 7, so that we together with Vion had a total of 16 ideas to bring into the analysis.

 

A lot of work went into creating a good basis for the testing tools. It was important that we generated solid concept descriptions for each product idea, so that we can use this information when consumer testing.

 

Testing is one of the most important phases in Module I, because this is where we ask the consumers to rate our ideas based on their preferences.

 

The entire Module is based on an objective to create some basic tools which all of the pig industry can use when product developing and testing the products on the market.

 

We are currently setting up a joint method for testing our product concepts at the consumer level. The development of this method is being presided over by the MAPP centre, University of Aarhus.

 

This means that the MAPP centre manages the progress of the tools, and we assist them with the business aspect of the methods.

 

Once the methods have been developed the idea is to test the products in various markets. Our product ideas will be tested on consumers from Denmark, England and Germany.

 

Both Vion and Danish Crown are involved in this process and from our point of view this is one of the most exciting parts of the Module. Here we get insight into how to perform a big consumer analysis and we gain knowledge on our products’ potential on the various markets.

 

Furthermore we achieve understanding on theoretical processes at the same time striving to shape the tools which can be used in every day product development.

 

The above argument is actually one of the most important ones to make, because in this industry it is crucial to make the tools as accessible as possible. Not many of especially the smaller companies are familiar with performing big surveys and consumer tests before launching products on the various markets, which is why it is important that the tools developed are easy to use and will be beneficial.

 

Now we are looking forward to finalising the testing tool and getting the consumer tests underway. We hope to get a positive response from consumers, so that we can use these results to launch some of our final product ideas.

 

Consumer/Market Analysis (ASB) S&T Objective: To develop new tools for the development and marketing of pork-based products based on mapping and assessment of behaviour towards the pig production chain as citizens and as consumers.   WP I.1.: Pan-European segmentation associated with attitudes and behaviour related to pig production and consumption of pork products.   WP I. 2.: Analysis of behaviour and willingness-to-pay related to value-adding quality dimensions and new product development.   WP I.3.: Marketing and new product development tools.