A global CPG food company was developing two positioning concepts for a new weekday dinner solution. Both addressed the demand for convenient meals, but they spoke to different consumer tensions: one focused on convenience for busy parents, while the other supported the meal routines of health-conscious consumers.
The company needed to understand more than whether consumers liked the concepts. The brand leadership wanted to know:
These questions carried implications far beyond marketing communications. Selecting the wrong audience or positioning could affect claims development, package sizing, portfolio strategy, retail activation, media investment, and competitive differentiation.
The category presented an additional challenge: convenience was already a common promise. Both concepts therefore needed to create value beyond speed of meal preparation.
The company needed a research approach that could distinguish the potential opportunities clearly—without allowing existing assumptions about the concepts or segments to influence the outcome.
SIVO designed an audience-and-moments research framework to determine not simply whether each positioning concept was appealing, but who it was for, why it resonated, and where it could win.
Each concept was evaluated against the company’s five-segment model of the weekday dinner category. The concepts were tested without segment names attached, allowing audience alignment to emerge from the analysis rather than being imposed in advance.
AI-enabled modeling was then used to identify the portion of the category audience likely to respond to each positioning and determine which segments were most strongly represented. The analysis revealed two different opportunity consumer profiles.
This distinction helped the company move beyond a simple "winning concept” decision. Instead, leaders could evaluate the concepts according to their potential strategic roles, including audience scale, frequency of relevant occasions, product format, brand role, and consumer expectations.
We examined the functional and emotional needs driving each audience.
For one audience, the decision hierarchy centered on household acceptance, convenience, confidence, and the ability to serve something that still felt like a legitimate dinner. For the otheraudience, credibility depended on nutritional quality, goal alignment, ingredient transparency, and confidence that convenience would not underminepersonal progress.
This analysis clarified that the two concepts were not simply alternate messages for the same consumer. They solved different consumer jobs to be done and required different expressions of quality. Understanding that distinction gave the company a stronger foundation for claims, creative development, portfolio architecture, and product design.
The research then identified five high-value moments foreach audience, framed through the consumer’s internal monologue. Each moment was assessed across five dimensions:
For every priority moment, the framework connected consumer context with a recommended message, tone, call to action, media environment, targeting signal, and creative direction.
This converted a traditional segmentation from a descriptive tool into an activation system that could inform decisions across the consumer journey.
The work gave the company a clearer, more commercially useful view of its two concepts. Rather than forcing both propositions into a single audience or selecting one based only on aggregate appeal, leaders could see that each had a distinct role in the portfolio.
That clarity created several business benefits.
The company gained a fact-based way to compare the size and character of each opportunity. The client team could evaluate where broader reach was most important and where a smaller, more defined audience might support stronger differentiation or premium value.
The findings established distinct messaging territories for each audience. This reduced the risk of generic convenience messaging and provided clearer direction for creative development.
The research showed how audience needs could translate into product decisions. For instance, one positioning pointed toward shareable or family-sized formats, while the other supported personal portions and stronger nutritional cues.
By identifying the situations in which consumers were most receptive, the company could align messaging and media with real decision moments rather than relying only on broad demographic targeting. The framework provided direction for search, social, retail media, CRM, retailer applications, and in-store activation across both urgent and planned occasions.
The analysis established a foundation for the next stages of development: refining the concepts, testing and prioritizing claims, and optimizing the combination of claims, flavors, formats, and price points against competitors.
Most importantly, the company moved from two promising ideas to two clearly defined commercial opportunities. It could now make audience, product, messaging, and activation decisions around the specific consumer job each concept was best equipped to perform—creating a more focused path from consumer insight to market execution.
SIVO helps brand teams move beyond traditional concept testing by using AI-powered intelligence modeling to identify the audiences most likely to respond, size the opportunity, and reveal the moments when consumers are most receptive to engagement.
By connecting these insights to messaging, media, product, and go-to-market decisions, SIVO builds actionable plans that help organizations target more precisely, differentiate more effectively, and invest with greater confidence.
The result is a clearer and more efficient path to consumer intelligence and therefore, to commercial impact, transforming complex data into practical activation strategies designed for measurable growth.
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