Your Customers Are Lying to You

Consumer brands – particularly food brands – face it every day.

You invest time, money and product to conduct in-store samplings or execute brand activations at public events. The feedback is positive, and you feel good about how it all went down.

But hold on. Don’t "high five” just yet.

The truth is, consumers – particularly Millennial consumers – rarely give honest feedback during in-person samplings when they don’t like your product. In fact, they’ll often straight up lie to avoid offending the person asking for feedback. As a result, all that “positive” feedback you received may be meaningless.

But don’t blame consumers for lying. It’s the sampling and feedback system that’s broken.

Here’s what I’ve learned about consumers and product sampling:

• Consumers generally dislike in-store sampling because they know you’re just trying to sell them something. (Translation: “Don’t market to me just because I tried your product.")
• Consumers are uncomfortable giving honest feedback to samplers or brand ambassadors if they dislike the product. (Translation: “It’s not my nature to offend someone face-to-face, so I’ll just say it was good, and walk away.”)
• Consumers prefer sampling something they really want in the comfort of their own surroundings, then give honest feedback without the guilt. (Translation: “Let me decide what interests me; experience it how and where you actually intended me to; then anonymously tell you what I really think.”)
• Consumers want the opportunity to have a voice in how your products are developed. (Translation: If you want me to engage with your brand, at least listen to what I have to say.”)

If you’re ready to step out of your comfort zone and hear the truth, let me show you how SamplingLab’s disruptive approach to product sampling and consumer insights is fixing this broken system.