Case Study: Snack Product Testing in Thailand — Central Location Test
- Client
- Food & Beverage / FMCG
- Duration
- May 2026
- Service
- Survey Design, Recruitment, Fieldwork & Quantitative Reporting
The Business Issue
A Thai food manufacturer was preparing to launch a new fried snack into a crowded, competitive category — and wanted to know whether the product would land before committing to a full launch. Three flavour variants were on the table, and the company needed evidence on which ones consumers actually preferred, how the product was perceived once packaged, and whether its planned price would hold up.
The questions weren’t ones a focus group or a hunch could settle. The client needed structured, quantitative evidence on:
- Product performance — how each of the three flavour profiles scored on genuine taste response
- Consumer perception — how the packaging and positioning shaped the product’s perceived value
- Market viability — whether the planned retail price matched what consumers expected to pay
The Techniques
- Quantitative Central Location Test (CLT)
Iconic Research ran a Central Location Test in Thailand, with consumers recruited to match the brand’s primary target segment. Rather than evaluate everything at once, the study was built in three sequential stages — deliberately separating taste response from packaging influence, and price expectation from actual price, so each could be measured without contaminating the others.
Who We Talked To: A sample of around 100 consumers, split evenly across three life-stage segments — Gen Z (school and university students), young adults, and parents/older adults — and further profiled by mindset (fun-seekers, health-conscious, and convenience/value seekers) so findings could be read by attitude, not just age.
The Three-Stage Design:
- Stage 1 — Blind Taste Test. Participants evaluated all three flavour variants in unbranded containers, with no packaging visible, rating each on taste satisfaction, aroma, and crunchiness on a 5-point scale. The blind format ensured flavour scores reflected genuine sensory response, uncontaminated by packaging design or brand association. Tasting order was rotated so no variant benefited from being sampled first or last.
- Stage 2 — Packaging Reveal and Price Expectation. Participants were then shown the packaging for the winning variant and — before being told the planned retail price — stated what they would expect to pay based on the packaging alone. This produced an expected-price benchmark derived purely from packaging perception.
- Stage 3 — Price Acceptance Testing. Finally, participants saw the brand’s planned retail price and assessed its acceptability against the product and packaging. The gap between expected and planned price revealed whether the brand was underpricing, correctly priced, or facing a packaging credibility gap that would suppress acceptance at the intended price point.
Our quantitative team designed the questionnaire, managed the fieldwork and data collection, and analysed the results — turning the staged test data into a structured findings report for the client.
The Results
The staged CLT gave the client a clean, evidence-based read on a product that hadn’t yet launched, isolating exactly where it was strong and where it was exposed:
- Product optimisation — which flavour won on genuine sensory response, measured before any packaging or brand cue could influence the score
- Packaging and positioning — how the packaging shaped perceived value, read directly from the price consumers expected when they first saw it
- Pricing strategy — whether the planned price was underpriced, correctly priced, or sitting above what the packaging led consumers to expect — the single most actionable output of the design
- Launch confidence — a defensible basis for the product, packaging, and pricing decisions before the cost of a full launch was committed
The three-stage sequence is what made these findings reliable: by measuring taste blind, then capturing price expectation from packaging before revealing the real price, the design separated variables that a single combined test would have blurred. Iconic’s quantitative team delivered the analysis as a structured findings report — not a spreadsheet of raw scores, but interpreted results the client’s team could act on directly across product, packaging, and pricing.
Planning a product launch? Partner with Iconic Research to test it with real consumers before you commit.
