Iterative customer testing at scale for consumer goods companies

Company Overview

Background

Loops is an audience feedback/iteration platform designed to give designers inside consumer facing companies rapid feedback on prototype designs to accelerate the ‘creative loop’.

https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXci2VZu16ZpFbuXznCL6nq64_GAT7YEaiGDZ6RCw7uttIGiQG12S50kYD08DVJVkZjv8euX7SHVeSZdcDKaQKig29znKi5wLlscSWXyj1KUshcFdrA8YO3GyRuHX8BLc1hiWeZ5PaFkP60gNkqLGSMePP_q?key=60y1u5Xqwk2V9EIGDHZfQA

Currently the creation of a new design for a consumer good follows an established path. Collateral created by the design team is passed to the Customer Insights (CI) team who then usually share it with a marketing agency. The agency then uses a consumer insights firm (e.g. Kantar, YouGov) to conduct market research on target customer groups (e.g. white females between 30-39 living in rural UK areas). These steps are sometimes compressed e.g. the CI team might interact directly with the market research firm, but the general process is broadly static. Unilever have claimed that this ‘insights’ process typically takes four weeks to create a single loop back to the design team. Without a sufficient number of feedback loops, collateral and branding decisions run the risk of being taken in isolation, resulting in sub-optimal marketing outcomes that only incur sufficient user testing after launch, at which point it becomes very hard to make changes.

Loops aims to dramatically accelerate that process. Using the platform, design professionals can upload their marketing collateral directly, define and approach their target audience without third party support, and then receive targeted and condensed feedback. Unilever have claimed that they have shrunk their insight process loop from four weeks to two days using Loops.

The platform can be broken down into three distinct segments. A demo of the product can be viewed here:

Step One - Upload

• Users upload marketing collateral to the platform. This can take any form, including static images, videos and fully formed multimedia ad campaigns with up to 30 items of images/videos/audio at once
• The Loops platform is built on WebGL and has direct integrations with Figma and Mira, making upload intuitive for design professionals

Step Two - Specify Audience

• Loops has direct API integrations into 300 market research panels across 45+ markets, giving customers access to 110 million potential individuals
• Customers specify how many people they want to survey (usually several hundred to several thousand individuals) based on 150 demographic filters such as age, gender, occupation, location, language, decision making status, parental/marital status and product specific filters
• Users can add direct questions on to the marketing collateral so that it is contextual for respondents
• Questions can invite binary yes/no answers or request specific feedback. This feedback can be layered on to the collateral (e.g. tell me which part of the journey doesn’t make sense)
• Respondent dwell times, cursor location and interactions are also logged to produce additional layers of otherwise uncaptured subliminal feedback

https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXcjdiWpSMRdEO_sKZ9UIcb_OQBvAlm2uzkuqmjWqXlJax3yJSXf-g_YXxxmDNkxe-IrgcEGUctGyT3kF-WHiLmxq90XgWOhlZAXCaCPoX-SmsE2aQz_UQnAWB4caAMc7hgQASLZNqIDK-cv4GlPURasJGA?key=60y1u5Xqwk2V9EIGDHZfQA

Step Three - Feedback