Play Market Research has kicked off a new way of doing product testing for clients, and it’s all about fitting seamlessly in with consumers’ lives.

Play has been operating product testing for the last 15 years, and has the goal of becoming the “biggest product testing company in Australia”, MD Chris Thomas told B&T.

“We were seeing a lot of clients launching products with testing,” Thomas said, “So we created a more standardised way of doing it.”

“We use innovative, creative and reliable market research techniques to get the feedback our clients need.”

Aiming to work “much more with the lives of respondents”, Play packages up 10 products and ships them off to consumers to try out at home whenever they like.

Thomas said they wanted to find a way of creating a standard, simple way of getting feedback on products before hitting the market for a pricetag of less than $5000. So for anyone wanting to test out a new product, get the lowdown prior to taking on the shelves, or see how something stacks up against competitors, Play has a solution.

Using the POP UP Shopper Community, Aussie grocery shoppers sign up to provide feedback on new and existing supermarket products. The members are profiled to find out how frequently they buy from different product categories, and include all standard demographic information.

Each month, at least 100 shoppers are shown a range of relevant products and asked for options, before receiving their product-testing parcel and providing more feedback. Testing processes include everything from sensory testing and observational recordings to key performance indicators to measure the likelihood of purchasing.

The process has also been optimised for 6000 different devices, Thomas said, with the consumer ratings available next year.