Case 05 CPG - Candy Concept Testing

They thought they wanted louder. The data wanted relatability.

Five commercial concepts, one production deadline, and a shared instinct that sour candy should go big. The concepts that won were the ones that started somewhere ordinary.

Client
Major candy brand
Industry
CPG - Candy
Engagement
Pre-production concept test
Method
Seven focus groups
The brief

Five concepts, a production date, and an instinct in the room that everyone found reasonable: this is sour candy for a young audience, so go big.

Make it loud, weird, extreme. The more outrageous the sour reaction on screen, the more memorable the ad. Nobody in the room had a reason to doubt it.

With the date fixed, the job looked like picking a winner from the five. That is a smaller question than it appears, because it accepts the premise all five were built on.

The path most would have taken

Test the five, pick the most attention-grabbing, produce it. That optimizes for spectacle, and spectacle was not what moved people.

How we built it

A ranking tells you which concept won. It does not tell you what all five were getting wrong together, and that was the more expensive question.

Who we recruited
Adults who actually buy the brand, not the young audience the concepts were aimed at. They can tell when an execution stops sounding like the brand they know.
What we asked
Rate and rank all five, for a defensible ordering. The ranking mattered less than the reasons behind it, and the reasons are what we designed the session around.
What we watched
Where attention went, where it drifted, and where people recognised themselves. A concept can score politely while losing the room, and no scale catches that.
What we tested for
Not only which execution won, but whether the premise underneath all five held up. That is the test that changes what gets made, not just which file gets opened.
7 focus groups 5 concepts Adult category buyers Rate, rank, and reasons
What the groups showed

Everything hinged on where a concept started.

WHERE THE ROOM AIMED × ELEGANT read as a perfume ad, not as the brand ✓ THESE WON GROUNDED ordinary life, pushed one step × ABSTRACT remembered the visuals, forgot the candy DRAWN FROM REAL LIFE PURE ABSURDITY
✓ Won the groups × Lost, and why

The pattern cut against the instinct in the room. The abstract executions scored lowest; the elegant ones did not register as the brand at all. Relatability was the engine. Absurdity was only the accent.

The reframe

The question on the table: which of these five is the winner?

So we changed the question

Does the brand need to get more extreme, or more recognisable?

The outcome

The research did more than pick a winner. It corrected the premise all five were built on. Take something from people’s actual lives and push it one absurd step, rather than starting from absurdity and losing them there.

Your turn

Testing the work, or testing the premise?

No lengthy brief required. If you know the decision you’re trying to make, that’s enough to start.

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