By Estela Viñarás, on 5 May 2022
A consumer panel is a marketing tool used by brands to determine how well a proposed product could be received by the public. It can generate a lot of insight into how your product will perform in-market as well as provide valuable information regarding how to adapt them to meet consumers' needs.
Read on to learn more!
What Is a Consumer Panel?
A consumer panel consists of creating a group of people and collecting their opinions about a product or service. The people selected should be as diverse a sample of the target audience as possible. It is also important that they commit to being honest since all the data obtained will form part of the market research that will determine whether or not changes need to be made before launching the product or service.
Types of Consumer Panels
- Trend-setting consumer panel: made up of people who are trendsetters or who often serve as a source of inspiration for others. Their opinion can be key to whether a product or service will sell or not.
- Generic consumer panel: participants are chosen randomly from the target audience.
- Brand-loving consumers panel: the group is made up of loyal customers who are satisfied with the brand's products or services.
- Creative consumers panel: this panel is made up of regular consumers who are knowledgeable enough to detect a problem and provide a solution.
- Transient consumer panel: the purpose of this panel is to extract data that can be used to understand how an event or phenomenon has influenced the consumption of a certain product or service. This means that interviews are conducted before and after this specific event.
Continuous consumer panel: serves to obtain information on the behavior of a group of consumers over a relatively long period of time.
In addition to these types of panels, there are also two more. The usage panel aims to understand how and why a certain product or service is used, and the purchase panel analyzes the type of products that are purchased and the reason why they are purchased.
Tips for Creating Your Consumer Panel
In order to make a good consumer panel, the first step is to define and design the product that you want to analyze. Once this is done, the next step is to decide the format and number of people who will form the consumer panel, and then recruit and select those who have the right profile. It is very important to ask this group for their sincerity and that they feel committed to the project from the very beginning since its success depends on their opinion.
Once this is done, the group will test the product or service and give their opinion. This is when the brand must collect all the information, extract results, and decide which aspects to improve or if the product or service is ready to go to market.
