Use of multi-market preference mapping to design efficient product portfolio

Preference mapping is widely used in food industry for purposes as diverse as mapping product offers, understanding consumer segmentations, identifying liking drivers or determining ideal product profiles. Such an approach is generally considered for a given target population in a single market. It is proposed here to move from traditional portfolios with one consensual product per market (leading to global product portfolios with as many products as markets) to portfolios with only two or three differentiating products for a group of markets. The proposed approach embraces all purposes detailed above in a sequence in order to design efficient product portfolios. As an example, it was possible to design a product portfolio for ten markets with only three products instead of ten, moving from less than 50% to more than 80% of consumers who get access to their most liked product. This was done using a multi-market preference mapping with 405 consumers (135 in each of the three leading markets representative of an Asian region of ten markets) who assessed a set of eight coffee mixes for overall liking and for likes and dislikes (open comments). The slightly increased complexity at market level (i.e. each market launching up to two of the three products of the portfolio) is largely compensated by the simplification at a global level and the insurance to please many more consumers with products that are liked for their differentiating sensory properties.