Claims Testing: Why It's Essential to Your Brand

In this blog post, learn why claims testing for product claims is important for your brand and how market research can help ensure claims are aligned with brand associations and optimized to be as motivating as possible.

What is claims testing?

Claims testing is the process of identifying which test claim(s) are best able to drive a desired outcome (e.g., driving purchase intent, reinforcing brand associations, highlighting product functionality, etc.) and optimizing the language and placement of those claims to make them as impactful as possible.

A claim is a statement a brand makes about a product/service or the brand itself. Claims are a way for brands to quickly convey information, whether it’s a reason for why the product/service/brand is worth buying or why consumers should think about the product/service/brand in a certain way. In other words, product claims can promote functional benefits, identify emotional associations, build trust, or even make comparisons with competitive offerings on the market.

Here are a few examples of different types of product claims:

Made with real fruits and vegetables
100% organic
A taste your whole family will love
Recommended by 9 out of 10 dentists
2x more powerful than the competition

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Why is claims testing important for your business?

Substantial investment may be put behind new claims, especially if these claims require packaging redesign or supporting marketing campaigns. This makes it critical for brands to monitor their claims to ensure they are aligned with core brand associations, relevant to the target market and target audience within that market, and as impactful as possible.

Alignment with core brand associations

At their core, claims are short representations of the brand. As such, it’s critical to ensure that claims have a good brand fit both with overall brand personality and messaging strategy.

For example, a premium brand would likely want to ensure that its claims are reinforcing premium perceptions among consumers. Claims that speak to being a bargain would be counteractive to the brand’s overall image and may undermine the brand’s ability to effectively compete in the premium space.

Another example is the tone used in claims. Brands in the financial services or health care spaces typically lean toward a more serious tone to convey security and trust. A claim that is too whimsical or light-hearted may have the negative consequence of eroding trust, resulting in damage to brand perceptions.

Impactful messaging

Claims can make or break whether a consumer is willing to buy a new product/service or trust your brand. Making sure claims are as impactful as possible is critical to making effective use of consumers’ limited attention span and, often, limited package or communications real estate.

To that end, customer feedback is extremely important to ensure claims are resonating and driving desired outcomes. To do this, claims need to be targeted correctly to speak to the types of consumers you want to reach in a manner that is both relevant to their needs and aligned with your strategy.

Do you want to encourage more frequent usage of your product/service among your existing customer base? Your claims should highlight use cases that are aligned with how your customers are willing to use your product/service.

Do you want to grow your customer base by building trust in your brand? Your claims should be crafted to resonate with non-customers and underscore how your brand is aligned with key elements of trustworthiness among that audience.

Legal considerations

Claims need to be tested to ensure they are based on reality and don’t run the risk of being perceived as misrepresentative or false advertising. In particular, claims that make direct comparisons to competitors (e.g., “2x more effective than competitor brand X”) or position your brand as an industry leader (e.g., “The best-tasting fruit juice”) are potentially open to legal challenges from competitors. If your brand is considering making these types of claims, it’s imperative to do claims testing with an expert to ensure the methodology is well-designed.

Additionally, it’s important to understand the broader context of your industry to identify if any regulations exist related to claim placement or content. Certain industries are heavily regulated and require extreme care with regard to how claims are made (in terms of both content and placement).

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Creating effective claims

In order for a claim to be effective, it needs to check the box on multiple elements:

Relevance: The claim needs to be relevant to the target audience, outlining the benefit that they will receive (this can be functional or emotional).
Believability: The claim needs to be believable. The best claims provide a Reason to Believe (also known as a RTB), which is a short explanation that underscores believability. This can be a demonstration of a brand’s history in the industry, the use of certain ingredients, the signoff of experts, or any other information that grounds a claim in reality.
Clarity: In order to be effective, claims have to be clear in terms of the benefit being offered and why it is relevant to the target audience. Any breakdown in clarity will likely dampen a claim’s impact. To that end, claims should use language that is easily understood by the target audience and make a clear connection between the benefit and the target consumer.
Memorability: Ideally, claims will also be memorable. Consumers are bombarded with many claims on a daily basis. Memorability can help a claim cut through the clutter and even potentially spur repeat purchasing of a product/service.
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How to test your claims

The MaxDiff methodology is an ideal testing solution for identifying a claims hierarchy if you have a list of seven or more claims to test. The benefit of a MaxDiff as a claim tester relative to traditional ranking questions is that it forces respondents to trade off between a group of claims, which more closely mirrors the real-world behavior of consumers. It’s also more sample efficient as a large number of claims can be tested at once among the same group of respondents. The MaxDiff output not only identifies which claim(s) are most likely to drive the desired outcome but also identifies a rank order to inform claim placement if you are looking to leverage multiple claims on the same package or in the same communication.

The Total Unduplicated Reach and Frequency methodology (often referred to as TURF) is great for exploring combinations of claims. TURF has the same advantages as a MaxDiff in terms of rigor and sample efficiency but provides the added bonus of being about to see the impact of grouping claims. The outputs of a TURF are the single reach of every claim (how many consumers it reaches), the incremental reach of each additional claim added beyond the top claim, and the combined reach (which shows you which combination of claims yields the greatest reach overall). TURF can help you determine how many claims to show together and which claims should be included.

An A/B test is another great option for claims testing. While not as sample efficient if testing a large number of claims, the benefit of an A/B test is that customer feedback can be gathered across an array of metrics that help provide context as to why certain claims are liked and others are disliked, and provide direction as to how to optimize top claims. An A/B test is a perfect methodology for exploring claim relevance, uniqueness, believability, clarity, memorability, and motivational ability (e.g., ability to drive purchase intent); how to improve on those key areas; and also how to position a claim in communications or on a package. Claims A/B testing typically follows MaxDiff and/or TURF work once a list of potential claims has been narrowed down.

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Examples of claims testing

Below are a few examples of claims testing studies, taken from quantilope's syndicated studies and client cases:

Skincare product claims with TURF analysis

When it comes to skincare products, the products on the shelves can claim to do a lot - reverse aging, clear acne, improve skin texture, exfoliate skin cells, etc. Then you have to consider claims like 'fragrance-free', 'citrus burst scent', 'all-clean ingredients', or 'with hyaluronic acid'.

All these claims can be overwhelming not just for consumers shopping, but for skincare brands to land on which claims are most effective to use on their final packaging. quantilope's skincare syndicated study shows how a brand might approach such decisions with a TURF analysis for product claims - to understand which claims will reach the largest number of consumers without duplicating reach. Check out the full study's results by downloading the dashboard here.

OMD's ad campaign and audience testing

In order to support clients’ needs for instant data and faster campaign development OMD partnered with quantilope to transform its market research and in particular, its processes for ad testing, campaign testing, and audience projects.

The insights team at OMD has since run over 140 research projects with quantilope for their
clients across a range of industries from home appliances, to automotive, FMCG (fast-moving
consumer goods), finance, and retail. Check out their full case study here.

Agile claims testing with Just Spices

Prior to working with quantilope, spice manufacturer - Just Spices, was left to rely on gut feel when it came to product development and strategic business decisions. This process wasn't working for their business, as their founder and CMO stated "We have launched products that we were completely convinced of, but that didn't work well in the market."

They implemented quantilope's Agile Toolkit to explore the spice category, understand consumer needs, test concepts, and validate the naming/claims of their products. Within the claims testing portion of their study, Just Spices tested a variety of product names and associated claims around general consumer likeability, purchase intent, brand fit, and more before settling on their final positioning: IN MINUTES.

With quantilope, Just Spices was able to narrow down its product naming and associated claims for an optimal product to launch in the market. Check out the full case study here.

Craft effective claims with quantilope’s research platform

If you want to craft effective claims that fit your brand’s personality and are impactful, quantilope’s online research tools will make survey design, data collection, and analysis of metrics a breeze.

With its intuitive online survey platform, claims can be tested through MaxDiff, TURF, or A/B Testing using a simple drag+drop approach. quantilope questionnaires are fully customizable so that you can pose questions closely pertinent to your brand. And if you’d like more spontaneous reactions to your claims, quantilope’s inColor solution delivers video footage of consumer reactions. Hearing people from your target demographic actually speak to the different claims really brings insights to life. This, along with inColor’s facial and sentiment analysis adds a deeper layer of understanding to claims reactions.

To find out more about how to perform claim testing with quantilope, get in touch below: