Key success metrics:
When Maple Brothers introduced their line of organic breakfast and snack products to Swiss consumers, they were bringing something novel to the market. From the beginning, though, their aspirations expanded beyond European markets to the home of maple syrup: North America.
But as any marketing professional can tell you, making the leap from one market to another is not always easy.
“It’s been an intense process of reformulation and repositioning,” said Matthew Gardner, Managing Director at the Maple Brothers. Their brand and their mission, however, remain steadfast: reconnecting kids to nature through food, stories, and experiences.
As Maple Brothers’ US operations neared the end of these early stages of product development, Highlight popped up on Matthew’s radar thanks to an episode of the Startup CPG podcast featuring CEO & founder Dana Kim and former White House Chef & Advisor and co-chair of PLEZi Nutrition, Sam Kass.
The timing was right: To refine and optimize before going to market, the Maple Brothers team needed to know what packaging concept would appeal most on shelf.
Internally, the Maple Brothers team had several potential packaging design ideas in the works. Before setting up their project in Highlight, they narrowed their options down from nine various designs to a set of four variations on a similar theme.
“[The platform] was very intuitive,” said Matthew of his experience setting up the Maple Brothers concept test in Highlight. “Everything was very logical in terms of the progression from adding the stimuli to the audience building,” said Matthew. Exploring his data and insights was simple, too. “All the visualizations were super clean and having the AI summaries was very nice.”
Highlight AI makes qualitative feedback quick and easy to analyze by automatically detecting keywords used commonly throughout testers’ responses, organizing by sentiment, and summarizing the findings.
Highlighters (what we call members of the Highlight product testing community) are well-known for their articulate and thoughtful responses. The Maple Brothers’ experience lived up to that reputation.
“It felt like respondents were taking the time to write a couple sentences,” said Matthew of the open-ended responses they received on their packaging concepts. “They weren’t just saying, ‘No, I don’t like that,’ they were saying ‘I don’t like that because the pink color makes it feel synthetic,’ and that’s actually useful,” said Matthew.
“I've had a little bit of experience on more generic A/B testing platforms where you quickly throw together a survey and pay a respondent to get responses back in a couple days,” explained Matthew. “With Highlight polling a vetted group of high-quality respondents, I wasn’t sure if that would take longer. But it didn’t at all.” Maple Brothers’ concept test opened to responses on a Wednesday, and had reached near completion by Friday, officially wrapping up the following Monday.
"The whole experience, start to finish, has been very easy and comfortable.” Matthew Gardner, MD at Maple Brothers
The good news is that Maple Brothers’ concept test revealed a clear winner across key metrics like appeal. But the concept test findings also made another crucial insight crystal clear.
The results of Maple Brothers’ concept test identified a clear winner across nearly every key metric–except for one very important strategic question.
Maple Brothers creates products primarily intended for children–but according to the results of the packaging concept testing, that wasn’t clear to the respondents.
“I did not expect that [result] at all, because you get so deep into your own brand, you become blind. You have a lot of blind spots,” said Matthew. Any brand or product owner can relate. “It was a very useful insight. Now we can work within the bounds of the winning design to improve the clarity of who this product is intended for.”
So when will you be able to find Maple Brothers on shelves here in the States? Hopefully very soon. The next step is securing a distribution partner here in the US–but that will be easier armed with consumer insights from Highlight research that shows they’ve created a product consumers love.