October’s top eight consumer products shed light on broader industry trends.
Glad Wrap has come out on top in the first set of Pop-Up Shopper Community results from Play Market Research while perception problems are causing otherwise great private label products to languish on the shelves, according to Play.
Launched in September, the Pop-Up Shopper Community is Australia’s first syndicated product-testing platform for FMCG companies, offering faster, more cost-effective and accurate insights in comparison to centralised research, the company says.
“Our goal in creating the new Pop-Up Shopper Community is to assist FMCG manufacturers in branding, marketing and NPD by ranking and benchmarking every product in the supermarket,” Play Market Research founder Chris Thomas said.
“In October, we tested 20 new and popular products from across leading Australian supermarkets and the results were surprising, to say the least.
“What’s clear from our results is that Glad Wrap is truly a stand-out product. It got some of the best scores we have ever seen – not just in Pop-Up Shopper Community tests, but in historic research as well. With consumer backlash on a packaging design change causing Glad Australia to revert back to its original packaging in January, I’m sure the marketing team will be letting out a sigh of relief at this fantastic result.”
The only area where Glad Wrap didn’t score highly was in its lack of uniqueness at product trial stage, which, according to Mr Thomas, is expected given the simple, functional nature of the product, how long it has been on the market and the number of copycat products available.
“For our first test, we opted for three private label products across a range of categories,” Mr Thomas said. “From our results, we can see that private label products appear to have a number of challenges.”
The results reveal that, although private label products are performing very strongly once tried, and represent great value, the real challenge is getting them picked up in the first place.
“We’ve found that consumers are hesitant to purchase these products due to issues with the product concept and unappealing packaging,” Mr Thomas said. “However, once they are in homes, most people actually would become repeat customers.
“Gaining trial is clearly the key challenge for supermarkets, since these products perform so strongly. Changing perceptions of the private label image might be more of a long-term goal through various communication efforts, but packaging renovations would be an easy first place to start.”
The results of the next 20 product reviews will be released later this month.