Testing products with children: an agile and emotional approach for more accurate insights

Testing a product with young people - whether children or teenagers - always represents a methodological challenge: difficulty maintaining attention, biases introduced by overly standardized questionnaires… Yet capturing their genuine feedback is essential to help brands develop products that are both suitable and appealing.
At Repères, we have developed a specific approach based on emotional spontaneity, allowing us to get as close as possible to the real experience of these young consumers.

Going beyond the limits of rational declarative feedback

Traditionally, product tests rely on lengthy, rationalized evaluation grids: closed‑ended questions, attribute batteries, satisfaction scales. But these formats, designed for adults, quickly become unsuitable for younger audiences:

• Difficulty maintaining focus during long sequences

• Tendency to give very high scores on traditional scales, making it hard to differentiate between products

• Limited ability to articulate complex feelings through standardized grids

• Risk of biased responses due to a desire to “give the right answer” or parental influence

We believe it is essential to free their speech and capture raw emotion instead.

One simple, fun question: “Tell me 3 words”

At the heart of our approach is a deliberately ultra‑simple question: “Tell me the first 3 words that come to your mind.”
By letting children express themselves freely, without induction or predefined grid, we obtain a much more spontaneous expression of their immediate experience with the tested product: taste, texture, pleasure, surprise… but also, at times, rejection or discomfort. This approach is particularly well‑suited to the dominant emotional mechanisms in young audiences.

Emotional analysis

The 3 collected words are not just simple verbatims. Each word is analyzed by our proprietary algorithm R3MSCORE, which calculates:

• The emotional intensity expressed (emotional activation, whether positive or negative)

• The sensory, emotional or projective territories evoked

We thus transform a free and intuitive response into robust quantitative indicators that can directly support marketing and R&D decisions.

In short: an approach perfectly suited to young audiences

Numerous use cases, particularly in food (dairy products, fruit pouches, biscuits, beverages, etc.), have validated the relevance of this approach, even with very young children (ages 3‑6):

• Ease of implementation: a fun, quick question suited to children's attention spans

• More authentic expression: spontaneous responses not influenced by questionnaire format

• Better discrimination than classic rational indicators: a stronger ability to identify the formulas that truly appeal and areas for improvement

• Actionable insights: feedback that concretely supports R&D, marketing, and innovation teams