Customer stories · Global consumer goods conglomerate, 3 mins

How a global consumer giant used Artificial Societies to accelerate product innovation

Challenge

A global consumer goods conglomerate was reviewing five new product concepts

A global consumer goods conglomerate was reviewing five potential new product concepts. However, there was high uncertainty in how to research the vast international market to decide which concepts have more promise for further iterations. The team needed to conduct rapid and cost-efficient research to help pick two winners out of the five. It is highly challenging to conduct rapid product research with human participants:

Recruiting human participants takes weeks, too slow for rapid product iteration rounds.
The products target health-conscious international consumers, difficult to recruit at scale.
Running a five-armed experiment would be prohibitive in cost.

“Without Artificial Societies, we wouldn’t have the quantitative insights that could help us narrow down product concepts effectively.”

Head of Innovation, Global Consumer Goods Conglomerate

Solution

Large-scale concept testing in a bespoke society of health-conscious consumers

To construct a bespoke society of health-conscious consumers, our Forward Deployed Engineers first worked with our social listening data partners to gather over 100,000 anonymised profiles across platforms like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Reddit, and X, in addition to health forum discussions and reviews of health-adjacent products like better-for-you foods and weight loss medications. Then, we combined profiles that have similar demographic and psychographic traits to create more enriched, multi-dimensional lookalike consumers. We also mapped out the audiences’ social influence networks and likely sub-group associations, so that the society faithfully models how opinions organically form in real-life settings. Throughout the process, the Artificial Societies team made sure to de-identify all behavioural traces, so that the simulation protects individual identities, while still being fully based on ground-truth behavioural data.

Health-Conscious Consumers
A bespoke society made of health-conscious consumers, segmented by their levels of health-consciousness and health-literacy.
1,498 personas

We then surveyed the audience’s opinion baselines towards the product concepts, ran a five-armed randomised controlled trial to compare all five concepts without cross-contamination, and explored a range of product names and feature options. The research completed within 24 hours from fielding to results.

Impact

Five concepts narrowed to two winners in 48 hours

With the rapid-turnaround research on the Artificial Society, the conglomerate’s team was able to narrow five initial concepts to two winners for further iterations in an extremely short period, providing confidence and clarity to move forward with conviction. To understand what did and did not resonate, we analysed the verbatim reasons behind individual participants’ answers — unlike traditional surveys, every survey question in Artificial Societies also asks participants to give a verbatim reason behind their selection by default. As a result, the conglomerate team was able to gain quantitative insights at scale and at speed. The full research project across two rounds of quantitative and qualitative research took 48 hours of fielding time in total, at almost 80% cost savings with over 2x the sample size compared to alternative human research.

1,498
Health-conscious consumers simulated
<24 hours
Per round of survey simulations
80%
Cost savings compared to a human panel with half the sample size
5 concepts
Tested in full confidentiality and without cross-contamination

Explore more successful stories