Of our own consumer testing.
Tests across CPG categories.
Real consumer responses.
Categories mapped by decision behavior.
PREDICTIVE data
Atlas is part of Predictive Brand Development™, the category SmashBrand created. Prove what wins in every channel, physical and digital, before a dollar goes to production. Then guarantee it in writing.
The industry problem
Consumer testing answers the big questions. Hundreds of smaller ones happen between them.
Which claim leads. Whether a benefit lands better shown or said. Whether that cue earns its space on the packaging. What to do when a result comes back close or unclear.
Most brands buy consumer insights once, near the end of the project. Our PREformance™ consumer testing runs at every stage gate of Path to Performance: Category Baseline Test, Pack Words, Design Diagnostic, Purchase Intent. All of it in-house, and the most advanced testing methodology in the category.
Even with that level of testing, the decisions outnumber the decision gates, and those decisions get made from experience, instinct and seniority. Consumer testing is a fixed point. Decisions are continuous. We call what fills the gap Guesswork Design, and it is the most expensive habit in CPG.
It gets worse, because the playbook applied in those gaps is a general one. The same shopper does not decide the same way in pet food as in salty snacks. In one aisle they scan fast and choose on a cue they could not name if you asked. In the next they read, compare, and look for a reason to feel good about the brand choice. Different attention, different cues, different logic.
Most packaging work treats those as one problem. It is the most common reason work that looks right fails to sell, and it stays invisible from the inside, because the work looks good.
INSIGHTS ACROSS EVERY CHANNEL
Customers have stopped separating channels.
Online is roughly 11% of US CPG sales and close to three quarters of CPG dollar growth. NIQ calls the digital shelf the most consistent influence point across the omnichannel journey. Eighty percent of in-basket products come from the top ten search results.
One shopper moves across all channels, the retail store, Amazon, walmart.com, your own site. We develop and validate the brand across the full omni-channel ecosystem.
Pack, planogram, findability
Claim hierarchy, purchase drivers, design cues, distinctive assets and what wins and loses at shelf, from a decade of our own category testing.
PDP, listing, storefront
Image stack order, listing copy, search context and storefront assets, tested in simulated search and PDP conditions with the same predictive discipline.
The same decision logic
How your category decides does not change when the shopper switches channels. Atlas reads the omni-channel journey through one model, so your insights stay consistent.
Atlas is not AI pretending to be people.
There is a lot of that around right now, and the skepticism is right. Today, vendors claim their synthetic respondents match real humans 90% of the time. But independent studies put the figure closer to 37 to 60 percent.
So here is exactly what Atlas is, and what it is not.
What Atlas is
- ✓A proprietary model of how shoppers in one category decide, built from ten years of consumer testing we ran ourselves.
- ✓Trained on real human responses. Over two million of them, collected by us, never scraped from the internet.
- ✓A way to drill down into your own research insights and answer deeper consumer questions, so every test enables smarter decisions, faster.
- ✓Willing to say it does not know. When a question needs real consumers, it says so and never makes up the answer.
What Atlas is not
- ✕A synthetic panel. It does not invent respondents or fabricate consumer testing data.
- ✕A replacement for human consumer testing. Our PREformance testing stays the source of truth. Atlas points it and extends what it produces across teams.
- ✕A sales forecast. It speaks to how shoppers decide, never to volume.
- ✕A general chatbot with our logo on it. Without our proprietary category model underneath, there is no value.
The difference
You already run consumer testing. Atlas answers a different question.
If you buy from Nielsen, Designalytics, Behaviorally or PRS, you get a verdict on a design. A standalone pack test tells you which of the options in front of you performs best. Atlas tells you what it takes to win in your category, and why the result came back the way it did at a deeper level.
| STANDARD PACKAGING TESTING | ATLAS ENABLED | |
|---|---|---|
| What you get | A score and a verdict on the options in front of you | An explanation of how your category decides |
| When you get it | At the moments you fund a study | Any time, including between and after studies |
| What it is built on | Norms averaged across many categories | Ten years of testing, organized by how each category decides |
| Which channel | Physical, or digital, from separate vendors | Both, read through one model |
| After the project | A deck that lives in a PDF | Your full insights, queryable by anyone on your team |
Consumer testing is the core of how we work, not something we bring in. PREformance testing runs in house at every stage gate, and ten years of it is what Atlas is built from. Atlas answers the deeper, harder questions that inform your specific category enabling smarter decisions, faster across teams.
Atlas is a proprietary advantage you cannot download, buy from a vendor, or prompt from LLMs.
We guarantee performance in every contract.
We are the only agency that does, and we checked. Across the design agencies you would consider, none offers a forward performance guarantee. They show past effectiveness awards instead.
Atlas goes live late 2026.
Tell us your category. When it is live, we will show you what ten years of testing already knows about how your shoppers decide, and what it means for your next launch.
No pitch until you ask for one. No spam, no list-renting. Your details stay private, same as everything else.