Intelligent Product Sampling

Product sampling is often used by companies wishing to trial a new product development (NPD). It may seem like a deceptively simple form of marketing. You simply put your product in front of your target audience, and let it do the hard work for you. However, this doesn’t mean that it’s an approach without subtlety.  Doing your product sampling in an intelligent way can bring incremental improvement to your results, meaning that you don’t only showcase the product, but showcase the brand, how to use it, and even get people to talk about it for you.

How can you make product sampling campaigns more effective?

Some of the areas where it’s most common to find product sampling campaigns falling short include:

• A lack of appreciation for context: where the sampling occurs is as important as how you deliver it creatively.  It’s important they see your product in the best, most relevant, light.
• A lack of creative impact: the way you deliver a sampling experience primes your potential customers for what comes next.  It’s important you use a strong creative concept to both frame the product in an exciting way, and also to attract people over to your activity.
• A lack of brand integration: you want to ensure your activity gels with the wider image of the brand.  Are you doing other marketing activity elsewhere?  If so it makes sense to echo this in your product sampling so you achieve greater familiarity.
• A lack of efficiency: although creativity is important, you don’t want to do something that might compromise your reach.  Is the activity easy to move around and work with?  You don’t have to do something big and complicated to be impactful.

What is intelligent product sampling?

Intelligent product sampling is an approach to sampling where you do everything in your power to ensure the product experience moment is as impactful as possible.

This means thinking strategically about when and where you deliver the sample – even if necessary creating scenarios where the sample will be consumed later on, without the brand even being present.

It also means thinking carefully about the people you get to represent you – choosing ambassadors with the personality and passion to immediately click with your audience, so they’ll be as open as possible to your idea.

It means bringing compelling but agile creative thinking to your product sampling – doing something that will pique people’s interest and draw them over, increasing your reach and the power of what you’re presenting.

And it means thinking about the big picture of your impact – how can you make waves beyond that initial sampling moment, and, of course, how can you measure it.

For too long product sampling has been seen by many brands as a bolt-on activity, or worse something they do in a reactive way when they have the budget or stock. Intelligent product sampling rejects that view, treating it as carefully as any other part of an integrated marketing plan.

Product sampling: an FAQ for brand managers