Putting a new twist on a kitchen pantry staple.

Making sandwich bags fun

Our client, a home products name brand with storage bag and container product lines, wanted to gauge reactions to their new sandwich bags with popular characters on them from a mass media company. They also wanted to test what price premium customers were willing to pay for this product compared to their regular bags and whether it would be more profitable to adjust the price, the bag count, or both. The main research questions they needed answered were:

• What are the initial reactions to characters on sandwich bags?

• How does adding a character change likelihood of purchasing versus bags with no characters?

• How strong is the combined brand equity for the client and media company?

• What premium does a branded bag with these characters have over competitors, all else being equal?

To tackle these questions, our client turned to the GroupSolver® team and platform.

Identifying the best product offering and price with GroupSolver®

Using platform tools such as our AI Open-End™ technology, we uncovered consumers’ initial and unprompted reactions to our client’s new bags. Building a probability of purchase model, we determined which character lines would be most successful on the shelf. This was an essential insight for our client to ensure that the investment required for the license of those characters would be profitable. In addition, we identified the product packaging, bag count, and pricing variations that best aligned with consumer preferences and value of the product. We uncovered the following results:

• General initial reactions to the themed bags were mostly positive, particularly for parents with young children.

• Adding a character to the bag significantly increased the probability of purchase, especially with parents. Those parents were willing to pay about a 15-20% greater price versus the equivalent product without characters.

• All else being equal, the client can charge a significant price premium on the sandwich bags simply because of the strength of the brand name.

• Our tests revealed that some characters were particularly attractive, and there was a correlation between characters and the gender of the children that parents were buying the product for.

A successful product that parents and kids love

With the help of GroupSolver® research, our client was able to confidently launch their new sandwich bags with some of the most popular characters found in our study. We identified the preferred size and price combination for these bags to ensure that every aspect of the product was optimized. Additionally, our in-depth insights on consumer preferences revealed key drivers behind consumers’ storage bag decisions that can be used to support future product developments.