[jnorthrop]

My brother was the brand manager for a dying food brand (well known national brand). The first thing he did when he was hired to improve the brand was to improve the quality of the food (better cuts of meat, fresher veggies, lower sodium, etc.). You know what happened? The customer complaint line was jammed with pissed people. He did a complete 180 and removed the higher quality items (the healthy stuff like vegetables), increased the quantity and sales started to climb.

That is a clear case of people wanting crap... in fact demanding it instead of the better quality product.

Note: Sorry for being vague about the brand but he is still there and might not want the full story public.

[michael_dorfman]

The key point of your story is that your brother's definition of "higher quality" didn't mesh with the customer's. That's a problem.

If people were satisfied with the product, changing the ingredients is definitely going to add risk. I worked for a food manufacturer, once upon a time, and we did extensive triangle testing even when sourcing ingredients from a new vendor.

People want quality. That doesn't mean their taste is the same as yours...

[jnorthrop]

The point I was trying to make is that the customer didn't want "better," they wanted the "same" even though it was crappy. The post I responded to seemed to want an example of that.

On your points, I agree mostly but in this case people didn't want better quality. They liked the taste of the lower quality product.

[michael_dorfman]

In that case, it's not "lower quality product" now, is it?

It may use ingredients that score better on certain metrics (low sodium, etc.) but these don't mean"better quality" in the sense that these consumers are interested in (the taste that they've come to like.)

[joshu]

Triangle testing?

[michael_dorfman]

Sorry, it's a common "term of art" in the food sciences.

Basically, it is blindly tasting three samples, and trying to tell which one of the three is different. (The other two are the same.) So, if you are testing a new supplier, you can give the subjects two samples from the old supplier and one from the new supplier, and see if they can pick out the odd one with any kind of statistical significance.

The key factor is that it is not attempting to measure "which tastes better", but rather, "which tastes noticeably different".

[joshu]

No need to apologize. Thank you for the explanation.

[ahoyhere]

You say they got angry calls, but you didn't talk about the difference in sales.

How did they brand the change?

Did they reposition the food items in the store?

Did they redesign the packaging?

Did they market the better food in the same way as the crappy old food?

How long did they give it the stuff to see if it would sell?

If you've been previously selling to misers with no taste, and you want to expand (misers with no taste are not loyal but they are loud), you have to not just change the product but the ecosystem.

Of course people bitch. People will bitch your ear off for any change. Every good manager knows this.

The question is: does it sell? And if it doesn't, are you doing all you can do to help it sell?

Just adding more is a local optimization. If you want to change the bigger picture, in a situation like that, you have to upgrade your customers... to people who will pay more. Which means your existing customers are likely, yes, to bitch. But, as you said, the brand was already dying so maybe its current customers aren't the right ones.

You can't switch Alpo with Finest Steak and expect to charge dog owners more money. Doesn't work.

[jnorthrop]

Those are all excellent questions. Unfortunately I don't have all of the answers. I know he test marketed the changes and that it failed -- it never made it to a full national roll-out. The way he tells the story is that he tried improving the quality of the food and promoted it on the package but kept all other variables equal (most notably price) and it was met with disgruntled customers and sales suffered. I guess I can say that this was a prepared meal product -- Ultimately what worked was sticking with the low quality ingredients, including more of them and ditching the veggies. In the end he did turn the brand around with this strategy.