Walk down any supermarket aisle today and you are surrounded by claims. High in protein. Source of fibre. All natural. Just one ingredient. For the consumer trying to make a good choice, it has never been noisier, or more confusing. We asked Andrea Steel, Senior Insight Consultant at FIS Group, what she is seeing in the market, and she keeps returning to one idea: consumer perception is the reality.
Her starting point is the education gap. People now pull information from an enormous number of sources, and a lot of it points in different directions. “There are a lot of situations where people think they know something, but they don’t,” she says, “or they feel they should know something, but they don’t really know where to trust.” Much of that learning now happens through social media and influencers, and it is not always right. Take the current buzz around protein and fibre. Both are everywhere in food right now, and in Andrea’s experience most people genuinely have not got a clue what they do, or how much of them we actually need.
That matters more than it might sound, because of a principle Andrea comes back to again and again. A business can know, as a matter of fact, that its product does something good. But if consumers do not perceive it or understand it, that fact does not count. “Consumer perception is the reality,” she says. “Clients can know their product does X, Y and Z, but if people don’t perceive that, they don’t get it.”
The market has not always helped itself here. In the rush to catch each new health trend, a lot of products have leaned on claims that sound better than they are. Things that were naturally free of an ingredient get a label announcing it, so they read as a healthy choice. Regulated terms sit side by side with looser ones. As Andrea points out, there are real rules behind “high in protein” and “source of protein,” with different thresholds for each, but to a shopper they feel interchangeable. The slow result of all this is distrust. When everything claims to be good for you, consumers start to believe none of it.
Layered on top is the ultra-processed food question, which Andrea calls a minefield. There is no official, agreed definition, so myths fill the gap: that a certain number of ingredients automatically means ultra-processed, or that anything you would not keep in your own cupboard must be bad. Meanwhile, food marketed as clean and simple often carries a heavy premium, a three-ingredient loaf costing several times a standard one. Eating well has always cost more, and with household budgets already stretched, shoppers have become far savvier and far less loyal, mixing and matching across shops and quietly trading down where they can. She raises a genuine worry too: as some products strip back their ingredients to look purer, they can also strip out the vitamins and minerals that were fortifying them, and nobody yet knows what that does to the nation’s health over time.
For an honest business with a genuinely good product, all of this is a problem, not just a headline. The risk is being lost in the noise, or being read in a way you never intended. And here Andrea makes a point that applies to almost every client she works with. Businesses are usually far too close to their own products to see how consumers actually read them. “Clients are so close to their product that they cannot see the wood for the trees,” she says. You know the truth about what you have made. That is exactly why it is so hard to see what everyone else believes about it.
So how do you find out what consumers really think, and why? This is where Andrea is clear that numbers alone will not save you. Quantitative research is powerful. It gives you robustness and it measures the size of things. But, as she puts it, unless you already know what it is you are measuring, it is meaningless, because you end up measuring your own theories about what consumers are doing rather than what is actually going on. That is the job of qualitative research: to understand the why, and to hear the real language people use. “People don’t know what they don’t know,” she says, and it takes a skilled moderator, probing and following the conversation rather than working through a rigid list of questions, to surface it. Done well, it does not just answer the questions a business already has. It uncovers the ones it did not know to ask.
It is a service that gets undervalued, and Andrea is honest about why. The people signing off budgets are often not insight specialists, and they feel more confident with a number like eight in ten than with a room of consumers talking. There is an old tension underneath it, that the more creative, exploratory work is usually the work that has to win over the more logical, numbers-minded people who hold the budget. But that confidence in numbers can be misplaced. A precise measurement of the wrong thing is still the wrong thing. The point is not that qualitative research belongs only at the start of a project, or only when something has gone wrong. It is that qualitative comes before quantitative. Whenever you are exploring something new or not yet well understood, whenever you need to understand people’s motivations and experiences rather than simply count them, or whenever the most important findings are likely to be nuanced or unexpected, that is where qualitative research earns its place. Sometimes that means shaping an early concept. Sometimes it means making sense of why a product is underperforming. Often it is simply asking a question no one has framed properly yet.
The through line is simple. In a market this crowded and this confused, the answer is not another claim. It is understanding what your consumers actually perceive, and why, so you can meet them where they are and stand out for the right reasons. That understanding comes from qualitative research, and it is where we would start. If that is a conversation you would find useful, we would love to have it.