Know exactly who you’re building for

Profile your target consumers — habits, attitudes, and emotional drivers — to guide smarter product, marketing, and innovation strategies.

Audience profiling

Highlight AIFinding

Wellness seekers pay more for clean labels and refills.

• +26 pts affinity gap
• 128 spend index

Audience mix

By opportunity segment

• Target
  • Wellness seekers: 42%
  • Convenience: 33%
  • Value buyers: 25%

Wellness seekers over-index +28 on category spend.

Audience insights that go beyond demographics

Understand your buyer

See who shops your category and why — usage behaviors, motivations, and the reasons behind the way they shop.

Prioritize your targets

Decide which groups to pursue — wellness seekers vs. convenience buyers — and tailor your strategy to each.

Humanize the data

Surface emotional drivers with exploratory qualitative research, so segments become people.

How Highlight does it

Identify — and learn how to engage — the right audiences

1. Measure category behaviors, trial, and usage
   Survey Highlight’s nationwide community of vetted respondents to measure category competition, white space, consumption, and usage — and profile the subsets you care most about, like heavy users or high spenders.

2. Get to the why with qualitative
   Pair the metrics with stories, verbatims, and optional video responses that take you beyond the what to the why — attitudes, context, and the emotional drivers behind shopper behavior.

3. Turn profiles into strategy
   Cluster consumers into actionable segments by needs, attitudes, and behaviors — then tailor innovation, messaging, and campaigns to what resonates with each.

Case study · Freestyle Snacks

How Freestyle Snacks validated a new product concept

• 100 Highlight testers delivered consumer insights within 1 day of product receipt.
• 92% survey completion across 24 samples of three snack flavors.
• Actionable improvements identified across formula, packaging appeal, and purchase intent.
• Better-for-you category benchmarks strengthened retailer presentations.

Getting started is simple

1. Design your test
   Define your objectives, create your survey, and set parameters for your ideal testers.

2. We ship your products
   We handle recruitment and distribution to get your products into the right homes.

3. See your data instantly
   Feedback streams into the platform and becomes actionable insight as it arrives.

The questions audience profiling answers

• Who is most interested in my product idea?
• Where can I find and engage these consumers?
• What motivates them when choosing products in my category?
• Where are their unmet needs — and my opportunities to win?

Common audience profiling questions

• How fast can I profile an audience?
  Survey-only profiling studies come back in days. When physical product is part of the study, expect roughly 3 weeks from recruit to final results — still a fraction of traditional timelines.

• Can you reach niche or hard-to-find audiences?
  Yes. Highlight recruits highly specific segments, down to a 3% or lower incidence rate — the audiences traditional research struggles to access.

• How reliable is the data?
  The Highlighter community has a 48% acceptance rate, and red-herring screening keeps unusable responses to 1–2% — versus an industry average closer to 30%.

• Is this quantitative or qualitative?
  Both. Quantitative surveys measure behaviors and attitudes at scale, while open-ends, verbatims, and optional video responses explain what drives them.