Categories

Product categories are at the heart of every Zappi test. It’s a big part of onboarding with Zappi, and it’s often the first choice you’ll make when you set up a project. The category you choose to run your project could affect the survey questions and answers and it can also help to determine the target audience for those surveys. This makes it an extremely important decision to make before you run even your first project.

Category Hierarchy

Category hierarchy is meant to group things in the most intuitive way possible.

• Parent - Vertical or very broad grouping of product categories.
• Child - Broad ‘product’ category
• Grandchild - Depending on the child category, these will be different types of products (chips vs pretzels) or variations of products (types of candy).

How it affects your sample

In most cases, the sample is influenced by the category you choose. For some solutions, we will filter out respondents based on whether they are buyers within that category. If your category is too narrow, more respondents will be filtered out, your results may be biased, and your project may take longer to complete. 

Categories define more than just your sample

The category you choose helps us to build the survey using the appropriate wording for the category. This helps us to create a quality survey experience for the respondents, which helps us to capture high quality data.

For example, a project using Activate It or Amplify to test in the salty snack category will be built using the appropriate variables for talking about salty snacks.

The survey will include:

• Singular and plural name - ‘salty snack’, ‘salty snacks’
• Category usage time - ‘last 2 weeks’ - this equates to a reasonable time period to learn about typical behavior in the category.
• Other category appropriate variations (eat vs purchase vs use, etc)

The category also determines the other options that your product or ad will be compared to:

• Product variants (flavours or types) - a list of types of products (i.e., Potato chips, Pretzels, Crackers, etc.), also referred to as ‘Grandchild categories’.
• Examples of product variants - a short list of 3-5 product variants that gives the respondent an idea of product types they’ll be asked about.
• Contexts/Occasions - situational examples that relate to the purpose / reasoning for purchase or usage; “to satisfy your hunger while you are on the go”.
• Brands - a list of market-specific brand names including competitors.
• Retailers - a list of market-specific retailer names.

The final result is a series of questions that collect particular information. Below is an example of a base survey question without the category applied:

• “How often do you typically [present action] [category name plural] (for example [examples of product variants])?

For the salty snacks category, the question would appear like this:

• “How often do you typically eat salty snacks (for example potato chips, pretzels, crackers)?

Approaches and Benefits to Consistency in Categories

Norms 

Categories help us compare like with like. Zappi’s Solutions and analytics automatically select a Parent Category or Child Category norm that best fits that category. This allows you to compare your stimuli with others that are as similar as possible. 

When you categorize within the Zappi category tree, you will benefit from the already accumulated norm in the Zappi ecosystem. This will ensure that a more varied and robust norm is being built as time goes on. Categorising broadly allows more products to be considered part of the competitive set. It reflects the variety of choice that consumers have at their disposal to meet similar needs.

What about the curated norm?

Our Zappi Curated Norm is available for Amplify TV projects in the US or UK. This norm is built and managed by Zappi to accurately reflect the real market, and is not limited to a single category. It’s a collection of up to 100 ads from all verticals and is refreshed yearly to stay relevant. 

Read more about Zappi Curated Norms.

Category customizations

Most of the time it’s best to use a Zappi Standard Category for all of your testing, but we understand there are use cases where you may need a customized category. We can customize:

• Grandchild/product variants
• Contexts/Occasions
• Brands
• Retailers
• Category Examples

Using the same category tree for advertising, Innovation, and Brand Tracking

In order to promote alignment across the pillars, we share category settings across our Advertising, Innovation and Brand Tracking solutions. This means that tools under these pillars use the same category trees with the same category variables under each child category.

An important consequence of this to remember is that changes in the category tree, including any customizations you may wish for, apply across the suite of tools.

Impact of categories in solutions like Amplify & Activate It

Amplify and Activate It are designed to give you the most realistic market insights as possible. The available category choices are broad and are linked to the same fixed audience. This helps us to hit the most representative target audience possible every single time.

The difference between these solutions and our other offerings is where the category filtering questions are built in. Category filtering questions help us determine if the respondent is a buyer, considerer or non-buyer within the category. For Amplify, the category questions are built into the solution itself. Our other solutions do not have the category questions built in because they are a part of the audience selection instead.

The Representative Audience helps us capture light buyers and, in some cases, even considerers that would have been excluded in other, more narrow audiences which could lead to skewed results. Learn more about Representative Audiences.

Once you get your results, you can still narrow them down to get a more granular view. So if you are interested in the performance of your concept among young adults, you can still narrow down your results to get those granular insights. Head to our article on Profiles for more information.

A note on Amplify:

In Amplify, audiences attached to each category are very broad, typically screening on Parent category shoppers (for example, those that buy food or beverages for their household). As a result of Amplify being centered around categories, you will select a category in configuration only, rather than a category and audience like Creative Video. The appropriate broad audience is fixed on the backend with a standard approach that includes filter questions like children in the household, income, and more. 

While ensuring our sample is made up of Category Users is a feature of our CPG/QSR version of Amplify, we have extended our offering into additional verticals like Tech, Telecommunications, Financial Services, Retail, and more. Due to the difference in purchasing habits of these verticals compared to CPG, there is no built in category screening. Instead, we offer a broad audience that captures demographics relevant to these child categories