What is Category Review?
Why Use Category Review?
Is Category Review Right for You?
Case Study

What is Category Review?
Category Review Studies are designed to evaluate a product or service from scratch starting with zero assumptions about the market – all we need to start is to identify current buyers.  From there, we build an understanding of the category that is based on the behaviors, needs, attitudes, and perceptions of the market without any of the prejudices, rules of thumb, or popular anecdotes in the industry.

The experience that managers bring to a category can be useful, but it can also become stale, especially in mature product categories that have been around for generations.  Category Review Studies are meant to shake things up, test conventional wisdom about the market, and bring new thinking to old problems – all based on direct contact with the buyers in the market.

Back to top

Why Use Category Review?

ุ      Real-World Perspective – The results of a well-designed category review study provide fresh, real-world perspective that is not clouded by the prejudices and habitual thinking of the industry.  These are the real reactions and attitudes of real consumers, carefully sifted and analyzed by NMM's researchers.

ุ     Depth of Information – Skilled Category Review moderators use a combination of well-crafted questions, spontaneity, and group dynamics to get respondents to open up and give honest, unprompted insights into their thoughts and behaviors – insights you simply can’t get from shorter, task-oriented groups (see AdChek, DesignChek) or question-answer survey research.

Back to top

Is Category Review Right for You?
Category Review is the ideal practice for any situation that calls for deep understanding of consumer behavior and how it functions in the industry.  Category Review studies are also particularly useful for manufacturers with new, aggressive management, whose mature products are threatened by new competition, or simply markets that have stopped growing fast enough. Past examples have included playing cards, paint, cigars, children's crafts, and adhesives.

Back to top

Case Study
In a category review of a D-I-Y product, we learned that store choice supersedes brand choice.  Consumers have a set of several brands that they consider perfect substitutes for each other, so whatever is in the store is what gets bought and consumers don't care what the brand is as long as it's within their acceptable set.  Much to the chagrin of managers, brand preference is almost non-existent among consumers and the performance of their brand is entirely dependent on their retail distribution.

Back to top