Pretzel Crisps

"This unique approach to consumer research helps to put metrics behind the emotional task of determining which new products to offer. With Affinnova optimization and measurement, I trust that we explored all of our options and I now have greater confidence to approach the trade with our new products, as we have greater visibility into how they will perform at retail."

— Perry Abbenante, Vice President of Marketing, Snack Factory

Headquarters
New Jersey, United States

Target Market
United States

Optimization and Measurement
Product Line Extension

www.pretzelcrisps.com

A Bold and Spicy Product Line Extension

The Snack Factory marketing team was contemplating extending their Pretzel Crisps® product line to offer two additional SKUs in the Bold and Spicy category. They were interested in identifying the two most popular flavors as well as the best packaging configuration that would resonate most with consumers.

CHALLENGE

Snack Factory introduced Pretzel Crisps, a flat pretzel cracker, to the market in 2004. In 2010, the company reinvigorated the brand and introduced new flavors and brighter packaging. In 2011, the team wanted to extend these new flavors and packaging with two new SKU’s in the Bold and Spicy category. The creative brainstorming process produced hundreds of possible flavor and packaging variations that they wished to explore, yet traditional market research methods would force them to dramatically restrict the number and diversity of concepts that they could test with consumers.

SOLUTION

Affinnova’s evolutionary optimization technology, IDDEA, eliminates the restrictions of conventional market research and enabled the Pretzel Crisps marketing team to test a potential space of almost 182 combinations of flavor and packaging options with consumers to identify the highest performing top concepts. IDDEA II measurement enabled them to evaluate the top concepts in terms of purchase intent, uniqueness, believability, and other key measures against other top concepts as well as competitive products already on the shelf to determine the concepts with greatest market potential.

SUCCESS

Through the vetting process, five unique top concepts emerged, primarily differentiated by flavor as the strongest driver of consumer choice. The top concepts showed different levels of preference by sub-group and that packaging had strong synergies with flavor and some impact on choice. The measurement phase ranked three of the five top concepts that showed the strongest potential to compete in the new space. Results showed how the new top concepts were likely to perform in market vis-à-vis the current line as well as against similar competitive products on the market today.