Thinking of running a consumer panel? Here’s how to get the best data at the lowest cost.

Does it seem like honest, detailed feedback from real consumers is getting harder and harder to come by?

You’re not wrong. Consumers’ attention is indeed in short supply, and people are less likely to respond to surveys from brands. Complicating this is the rise of survey fraud, where respondents misrepresent their demographic information to gain access to more paid surveys or even have bots take the surveys numerous times on their behalf.

To get accurate feedback on product formulas, packaging, and purchase intent before committing to a costly product launch, many brands are turning to consumer panels instead. Unfortunately, these can be expensive and resource-intensive, and getting people to sign up can be tricky.

Here, we’ll take a look at what consumer panels entail and how to get the most out of them.

What is a consumer panel?

A consumer panel is a select group of consumers who will try out your products and offer their thoughts over the course of a defined period of time. You can also have them record their purchasing decisions throughout this period to give you some product benchmarking insights.

The core purpose of consumer panel testing is to help you, as a brand, understand the voice and habits of the customer so that you can win with retailers.

Generally, the panel’s participants are chosen based on criteria that relate to your specific goals in running the panel and/or the demographics of your target customers. Goal-related criteria might include:

• “Trendsetters”—people who are really on top of the latest trends and can help you figure out if your product can ride on the latest wave
• People with a creative bent who can help you brainstorm new ideas or even co-create with your brand

Demographic criteria could be anything like new parents who are both working, single pet owners who are very health-conscious, or kids 8-12 years old who like cheese.

Consumer panels can be in-person or online. Online panels can give you much-needed insights more quickly and easier access to a wider range of people who meet your criteria. On the other hand, in-person panels can make it easier to interview people in greater depth and have more of a back-and-forth that can yield valuable insights.

How do consumer panels compare to traditional market research methods?

A consumer research panel tends to outperform methods like one-off surveys and focus groups in delivering real-time insights and broader audience coverage. You might get data quickly with mass surveys, but it might be corrupted by a fair amount of fakery (since some people actually try to make money taking surveys).

Focus groups have issues with data authenticity as well, but for a different reason. The limitations of focus groups have to do with bias, particularly social desirability bias and people’s tendency to say what they think the moderator wants to hear. They’re also typically lacking in diversity, making it hard to scale the insights they provide.  

The main advantage of a consumer panel, however, is its ability to demonstrate purchasing tendencies and attitudes about your product over time. Longitudinal studies are an important part of product testing research, particularly when you have a product that gives results after a period of usage, or you’re wanting to see how your product might fit into people’s overall shopping habits.

How is consumer panel data collected?

There are a lot of different ways to run a consumer panel, so there are plenty of ways to collect data, too. Here are a few things you can have participants do:

• Take a survey every few days about how they use your product
• Track their purchasing habits in a “purchasing diary”
• Scan the barcodes of every purchase they make in a purpose-built app
• Film themselves using their product and talking about their impressions

Keep in mind that consumer panel surveys must follow all the best practices to mitigate biased responses, i.e. avoiding leading questions, showing questions in different orders for different participants, etc.

Are there any downsides to consumer panels?

The main concern felt by most companies in need of fast, reliable consumer product testing insights is that consumer panels can be resource-intensive to organize and run. It’s not easy to recruit participants, and the ones you do succeed in recruiting may drop off if the panel goes on for too long.

As with large-scale surveys, it’s also possible to run into so-called “professional panelists”—people whose main motivation is to make money, not to give you honest feedback. When the incentives are high enough for people to see consumer panels as a job of sorts, that puts you at risk of getting a lot of junk data—including from people who are pretending to be women in their 40s but are actually men in their 20s.

It’s a challenge to find the right level of compensation that will encourage people to sign up without attracting the ones who don’t have your best interest in mind.

How do you organize and run a consumer panel?

There’s plenty of leeway in how you want to run your panel, and there may be special considerations for the specific niche your product is in. But here’s a quick roadmap that should work for most situations.

1. Recruit a representative group of participants. You want to work with panelists who reflect the general population within your target customer base.
2. Verify that panel members are right for your study. You’ll want to make sure they’re really who they say they are in terms of demographic info. Also, it’s important to gauge their ability to answer surveys thoughtfully and articulately.
3. Create a structured survey plan with good questions. To capture meaningful feedback, you should ask solid market research questions and design the survey in a way that keeps bias to a minimum.  
4. Clean, analyze, and visualize your data. AI-powered tools can help you summarize common themes present within open-ended survey responses, and graphs and charts can help you see trends in quantitative data.
5. Set up a way to tap into this community as needed going forward. You’ll probably want to get more insights from them in the near future. Keeping an email database or having them install a mobile app can help you reach participants instantly at any time.

Of course, there’s also the part about turning your findings into strategic decisions about your product launch. The more care you put into setting up and running your panel, the clearer these decisions will be.

Get all the benefits—and none of the hassle—of consumer panels with Highlight

If running a consumer panel seems like a daunting undertaking, don’t worry—there’s an easier way.

In fact, Highlight makes it so easy to get consumer panel-type insights in multiple stages throughout your product development and launch process, from the ideation stage all the way to the point where you’re refining the final packaging.

How do we do that? It starts with our testing audience. We pre-screen our testers to make sure they’re motivated to give honest, detailed feedback that brands can actually use. Furthermore, each “Highlighter” focuses on one study at a time, ensuring that the tests fit easily into their daily schedule. This simplifies the process of running longitudinal studies, and it also weeds out people who are only motivated by product testing compensation.

If you’re trying to target a specific niche of consumers, Highlight helps here too. We provide robust consumer profiling and enable clients to target hyper-niche groups who represent less than 1% of the population.

So, if you’re worried about using a survey service that’s constantly battling bots and other fraudulent efforts to game the system, but you’re also overwhelmed by the thought of organizing an entire consumer panel, remember you’ve got another option that makes getting good longitudinal data easy!