Devise a Killer Assortment Combo with TURF Analysis

You’re responsible for product development innovation at a kombucha company, and you’re hoping to get some new, kombucha-curious customers hooked on your brand. One great thing about kombucha is that flavor options are basically infinite. For you, that’s both a blessing and a curse.

Your company doesn’t have the resources to produce every single cool-sounding flavor right now, so you have to make some choices. How can you narrow down the top three new flavors that will attract the most customers?

This is a common dilemma for CPG companies. When trying to expand their reach in a crowded market, they need to select their product line’s flavor/color/feature/etc. options wisely. Nobody wants to waste money on products that won’t increase sales.  

Also, time is of the essence. Delays could mean missed market opportunities and declining sales.

So, what to do? Enter TURF analysis, a great way to optimize your product line by tapping into the latest trends in consumer preferences.

(For the purpose of this article, we’ll be talking about flavors. However, this could just as easily be colors of a dress, scents of an air freshener, or anything of the sort.)

What is TURF analysis?

TURF analysis is a survey-based market research method that can tell you which combo of product variations will entice the greatest number of people.

The acronym stands for Total Unduplicated Reach and Frequency, in which Reach refers to how many people buy one of your kombucha flavors, Frequency refers to the average number of flavors each person buys, and Unduplicated means that you’re not counting the same kombucha buyer twice.

Unduplicated is very important, because (at least with this type of study) you’re not trying to reach the same person 20 times—you’re trying to reach the maximum number of people at least once. In essence, you’re controlling for the overlap of people liking multiple flavors.

Without this overlap, you’d just take the flavors with the highest “I like it” percentages—end of story. There’d be no need for fancy TURF market research with statistics and all that jazz!

Since people are complicated, and they often like more than one flavor, the math gets a bit tricky. As you increase the number of possible flavors, the amount of flavor combinations quickly balloons, and the compute time skyrockets. Special optimization methods are required to minimize compute time and maximize accuracy.

TURF analysis is often combined with MaxDiff (Maximum Difference Scaling) analysis to first get a solid sense of which features/options people love the most and which they could live without.

Benefits of TURF analysis market research

The first and foremost reason that companies do TURF studies is that their budgets are finite and they want to get the most bang (in terms of customers reached) for their buck. Flavor options that don’t prompt more sales waste money.  

Even if you add a new flavor that people really like, it’s not necessarily worth it if it causes them to buy less of a flavor they already purchased regularly. This is called “product cannibalization,” and it’s best avoided.

There’s more, though. In behavioral economics, something called “choice overload” has been shown to cause people to buy less when faced with more choices. More options can give us decision fatigue, as the mental effort required to evaluate multiple tradeoffs makes us want to run for the hills.

Here’s a quick summary of what you’ll learn with a TURF study:

•   What combination of flavors will reach the most customers
•   How many flavors, on average, appeal to each person
•   How many additional customers each flavor is likely to reach

If you need to sub out a flavor due to, say, supply chain disruptions, TURF analysis can help you pick a new one that will keep the biggest percentage of your customer base satisfied. (You can combine this with alienation testing to see whether, for example, reformulating the flavor with differently sourced ingredients will work.)

One thing to note: TURF market research doesn’t have to just focus on product attributes. You can use it to figure out which marketing claims will resonate with the greatest number of people and which marketing channels (social media, search engine marketing, Super Bowl commercials) will have the broadest reach.

How to run a TURF study

Luckily for you, putting TURF analysis into action isn’t terribly complicated. It starts with the fun part: brainstorming all the flavors (or other product attribute options) that you might be able to offer your customers and selecting the most promising ones. (This list should be a bit larger than the number of options you can actually afford to offer.)

The next step is to clearly identify your target audience. Surveying the wrong audience can give you results that aren’t helpful, because there are people out there who will never, ever be giving kombucha a try, and they won’t be considering any flavors.

Take into account demographics, buying behaviors, and who might need your product the most (for kombucha, this could be people who are keen on improving their gut health). Ultimately, you’ll want to build a survey audience of a few hundred people or more.

Model your survey questions on the following examples:

• Which of the following snacks would you consider trying?
• When you buy household cleaning products, which of the following features are most important to you?
• Which of the following energy drink flavors would you be most likely to purchase if they were available at your local grocery store?
• Which of these skincare products do you buy on a regular basis?

You can vary the number of choices that you allow people to select, including “all that apply.” TURF survey questions can be easily adapted to best serve the specific market needs for your product.

Once your survey data is in, it’s time to interpret the results. Although we said above that the math is hard, the good news is that TURF analysis is built into most statistical software platforms.

Limitations of TURF analysis

If you’re someone who likes to ponder things deeply, you may have noticed that TURF analysis market research doesn’t take into account the differing ways that the average consumer approaches certain types of purchases. For instance, if you see multiple kombucha flavors on the store shelves, you might buy several of them. If you’re shopping for vacuum cleaners, however, you’ll probably just buy one.

Product category-specific purchasing behavior isn’t something that TURF analysis really deals with, nor does it differentiate between “light user” customers and the ultra-obsessed. You won’t learn anything about the impact of pricing or brand reputation.

Even if TURF analysis might not always tell the whole picture (and what does?), it’s still valuable in helping you maximize reach and minimize product cannibalization. It’s easy enough that you can run tests frequently and stay well ahead of customer preference trends.

How Highlight helps

Remember the importance of testing with the right audience? This is one of the biggest hurdles CPG companies face when trying to do product testing research. It takes time to build an audience, and even when you manage to recruit hundreds of people, it’s not easy to get them to really focus on the testing and complete everything.

Highlight is committed to recruiting enthusiastic testers who give authentic, nuanced feedback to all prompts, and the testing audience can be segmented into ultra-niche categories. This ensures that you’ll always be able to target the right people for your surveys.

Highlight also has great insights into survey design. If you’re confused about how to design a good TURF study survey, we can help.

Expand your turf with TURF!

TURF market research is an excellent way to find the winning combo of product options that makes your brand attractive to the most people. You’ll also avoid spending money on flavors, colors, features, or other attributes that won’t add to your overall sales.

When you feed Highlight’s metrics into your TURF analysis, you’ll know that your resulting SKU optimization is grounded in real consumer behavior. It’s time to stop trying to guess what your customers want most—rather, ask them directly!