Shelf Testing for merchandising research
PRS IN VIVO wanted to perform a shelf test for merchandising research for a hair care client. Our 3D virtual shelves helped them offer a realistic and immersive virtual alternative in times of Covid-19.
• 3D Virtual Shelves
• Survey Data Reporting
PRS IN VIVO helps marketers improve their shopper experience by delivering accurate insights on consumer choice and behaviours. They specialise in shelf testing, including package design or shelf layout research.
They traditionally perform in-person research which can become quite pricey, so they were interested in offering a time and cost-effective virtual alternative.
Before working with us, their virtual shopping solution consisted of a single-shelf digital image, offering respondents the possibility to virtually ishop from the shelf as part of their surveys.
What ConceptSauce has allowed us to do is to create more realistic shopping environments. So instead of having a single shelf digital image, we can create a more realistic, more 3D, more immersive shelf and store layouts that we can use for our research. It’s improving what we offered with our existing online digital options.
For this particular project, PRS IN VIVO was working with a client specialising in hair care products.
Because it’s quite a complex category, within hair dyes and hair treatments, they traditionally did in-person research and were not interested in virtual shelf tests.
Working with us allowed them to offer the client a more realistic virtual experience.
In this particular study we were able to transition them into a digital survey using ConceptSauce during the Covid-19 lockdown.
The study was about shelf merchandising, understanding the effect of different points of sale materials and ways that they could segment the shelf: either by hair colour, by brand, or by formats.
That included simple banners at the top of the shelf, peg-boards, or shelf barkers.
PRS IN VIVO wanted shoppers to be able to appreciate what the different materials they were testing looked like in the most realistic environment.
This required us to build quite a challenging display. In this display set, we had to develop a bay structure that had a wood finish with seven bays that housed a number of transparent looking shelves.
In each shelve setup, we had a large POS header concept that spanned across the seven bays, as well as promotional sales displays on every shelf. The respondents would be shown all the bays at the start, then they would progress to zoom in to the specific areas of the bays.
We needed to have the full shelf available to our respondents so that they could understand the necessities of every point-of-sale materials within the real context of the shelf. We needed the ability to display the shelf visuals in a 3D environment, be able to zoom in or move left and right along the shelf.
We were happy to have built and delivered the display to the client’s expectations and on time.
At ConceptSauce we are determined to offer realistic virtual shopping experiences, and we are happy to have helped PRS IN VIVO show its value to their clients.
It’s definitely a methodology that we will continue to use in certain conditions. Especially when we’re testing shopping layouts, shelf configurations or POV materials, then certainly ConceptSauce provides us with an invaluable resource to do that.
They are very responsive to our needs, and there is a strong working relationship between the PRS IN VIVO research team and the team at ConceptSauce. They’ve proven to be a very valuable partner to us.
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