# 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.