Consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies are constantly navigating the delicate balance between keeping pace with evolving consumer values and ensuring their products continue to deliver on everyday needs. Today’s buyers expect more than just quality. They expect brands to align with their lifestyles and values which is why CPG leaders are rethinking how they can approach research to capture these unique insights and capture both the “what” and the “why” behind consumer behavior.
At Alida, we are seeing an increasing number of brands choosing to build ongoing customer communities that serve as always-on sources of insight. These communities provide speed, depth, and cost savings while also creating stronger connections between brands and consumers. Two CPG leaders, 7-Eleven and Cabot Creamery, illustrate how communities are transforming the way companies listen, learn, and act in today’s crowded marketplace:
7-Eleven: Building a Large-Scale Community for Continuous Insight
7-Eleven’s traditional full-service research model was lacking flexibility, with budget limitations restricting the number of projects the team could run each year. To overcome this, the company built their “Brainfreeze Collective”, a hybrid in-house research community of more than 300,000 customers dedicated to helping shape the future of their convenience stores.
Participation is incentivized through a loyalty points-based program, attracting engaged customers that are deeply invested in their brand rather than unverified participants. The Brainfreeze Collective enables multi-wave studies, follow-ups with the same participants, and the use of video feedback to capture emotional and subconscious motivations behind customer choices.
To better interpret customer data, 7-Eleven uses structured behavioral segmentations, including recency, frequency, and monetary analysis, as well as mission-based segmentation to understand the reasons behind store visits. Insights from the community are directly linked to product innovation, guiding decisions such as product naming, flavor selection, and launch strategies. The 7-Eleven team also used its community to test in lab stores in order to further validate real purchase behavior, helping to reduce risk before broader product rollouts.
By bringing research in-house through a customer community, 7-Eleven has been able to increase the speed and volume of projects, and scale their qualitative research, all while reducing costs associated with external vendors and participation incentives.
Cabot Creamery: Using a Focused Community to Shape Business Decisions
Cabot Creamery, the farmer-owned cooperative, set out to explore sustainable packaging options for its flagship cheese bars. Because this initiative touched a core product, the company needed to ensure any change aligned with consumers’ values around sustainability as well as practical needs such as usability, freshness, and storage.
To uncover insights beyond what surveys alone could reveal, Cabot conducted live video discussions with consumers who received cheese samples in prototype packaging ahead of the sessions. This allowed participants to test the packaging firsthand and share their experiences in real time over video. Recruitment for the study included loyal members from Cabot’s 5,000-person insights community with new-to-brand participants across different demographics. After the sessions, follow-up surveys helped close any gaps and clarify findings.
The research gave Cabot confidence to move forward with a packaging redesign, transitioning to 30% post-consumer recycled packaging, a change that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions and fuel requirements by up to 25%, while also saving water in manufacturing.
How CPG Brands Are Rethinking Research
Research is all about driving smarter business decisions. To do this, more CPG brands are choosing to embrace community-based and hybrid research models that integrate seamlessly, reduce costs, and allow for rapid iteration with real customers. The most forward-thinking brands are also combining their own first-party behavioral data (what customers actually do) with attitudinal insights (what customers say they feel). By layering these two perspectives, brands get a more complete picture of consumer behavior — not only the actions taken at the shelf or online, but also the motivations driving those actions. This richer context allows teams to identify growth opportunities faster, de-risk product launches, and build stronger consumer connections.
And the beauty of a community approach is the immense flexibility. Many, like 7-Eleven, rely on large-scale, always-on customer communities to fuel continuous insight at scale. Others, like Cabot Creamery, turn to smaller, more intimate groups of customers to complement broader research and validate strategic initiatives. Both demonstrate how adaptable these models can be when aligned to a brand’s specific goals.
Another trend shaping CPG research is the rise of qualitative feedback, specifically using the power of video. Video allows brands to move beyond surface-level responses and uncover deeper motivations and emotions that traditional research methods can sometimes miss. This richer layer of insights helps CPG brands bring the voice of their consumer directly into their decision-making process.
Together, these shifts are closing the gap between what consumers do and why they do it. Brands that embrace flexible community research models, leverage video for deeper understanding, and blend quantitative and qualitative insights, are better positioned to adapt quickly, test bold ideas, and stay competitive in their industry.
