Curion Score FAQ

The Curion Score™ is a composite metric that captures the total consumer hedonic performance / preferences of a product.  Included with the score are category benchmarks from our database that allow you to understand how your product performs compared to other products in Curion’s database, often including competition.

Rather than being a single measure, it incorporates a weighted range of key performance indicators. In this way it provides a holistic picture of product performance as well as opportunities for improvement relative to a landscape of products in our database.

Think of the Curion Score™ as capturing total sensory performance by incorporating opportunities and liabilities, whereas overall liking captures hedonic appeal only.

The Curion Score™ provides new perspectives for brands to reference when interpreting results. 

• The Curion Score™ helps uncover new things about the industry. The benchmarking / star ratings differentiate products better than OAL and provide external context, resulting in category level ability to prioritize performance as high, middle, or low among the Curion benchmark dataset. It also allows the ranking of products by sensory performance, which may or may not correlate with liking. 
• It brings confidence to brand strategies by reinforcing decisions.  A recommendation to move forward based on “fewest penalties”, for example, is more powerful if it comes with the knowledge of superior performance when benchmarked versus other products tested in the category.

The Curion Score™ incorporates the power of the Curion consumer databases with over 250,000 consumers and thousands of products tested. It accounts for the variability across different types of studies and conditions and represents a comparison of a particular product against all products that have been tested in its category. Instead of benchmarking against one product in a test, Curion Score’s™ benchmark is against hundreds of products in our database to assess performance and the probability of consumer success.

This is in contrast to traditional benchmarking studies in which the comparison is limited to the products used in that test. Traditional benchmarking makes the selection of which products to benchmark against to be problematic and limits generalizability of the results.  In situations where the choice of a benchmark is debated and controversial, use the Curion Score™ as a solution to provide a more comprehensive benchmark.  

Overall liking, the usual metric used to measure performance, is problematic in several ways, e.g., being unidimensional, impacted by factors such as the number of products tested, questions asked or the experimental context. It also suffers from range compression at high levels, making it difficult to identify the best product in a selection of equally well-liked products. The algorithm developed for the Curion Score™ was purposefully designed to be minimally affected by these factors and is much more stable than overall liking.

The Curion Score™ is stable over time. A product that was tested 6 months ago can be directly compared to a product tested last week because both are benchmarked against the Curion database.

Metrics like Overall Liking shouldn’t solely be compared across studies. Since context and study design variables significantly impact ratings (number of products, etc.), adjustments are required to make metrics across studies comparable. Curion Score’s™ algorithm accounts for these which allows for more accurate cross-study comparisons.

The Curion Score’s™ algorithm takes into account individual questions and the total pattern of responses in a survey and converts them into a composite score that rewards the product for positive experiences and penalizes it for negative experiences.

The Curion Score™, as a sensory performance measure, only includes the measures in a survey that bring to life the total sensory performance. This means Overall Liking and the rest of the survey measures that bring to light sensory opportunities and liabilities, for example, hedonics.

The Curion Score™ is validated through several phases:

1. The technical strategy and algorithm for Curion Score™ were reviewed by strategically created teams of technical advisors from both academia and industry, including statisticians and PHD holders. The result is an enhanced and improved algorithm after multiple iterations and tests.
2. Testing was completed to confirm that (1) the results were repeatable both within a study and across independent studies, and (2) the Curion Score™ made logical sense given the full data set.
3. The Curion Score™ was specifically assessed by looking at current market products that have proven to be a great success compared with their placement in the database, proving great in-market products are top database Curion Scores™.

The stars in the Curion Score™ represent a percentile ranking of products tested in the category. While top 10% in a category is a gold standard, “good” is relative for different brands and their product objectives. While the go-to-market decision and any other strategies and tactics are made by the brand leaders and their teams, the Curion Score™ supplements these decisions by providing actionable insights around the tested products. Our Curion Score™ team can provide guidance through several options and strategies:

• Better than the category average.
• Better than key competitors to gain higher market share.
• Same quartile as a key competitor or product to gain higher market share.
• Curion’s Best of the Best (Five-star products).

Key factors assessed include the risk of the product (i.e., high or low capital requirements), relaunch or a new innovation status, and the cost of producing the product.

A main benefit of the Curion Score™ is our proprietary algorithm that normalizes scores across the database.  A few key factors that are adjusted include type of study (CLT, HUT, Lifelabs, etc), number of products tested (including first position), number of questions, and more.

No, not at this time. In order to provide consistency across the Curion Score™ database, products tested are benchmarked against other products tested within the Curion Score™ system. Our database includes hundreds of thousands of products within the Fortune 500 and across multiple categories, collected over multiple decades which results in over 500 million data points. This results in accurate Curion Scores™ across industries and categories, using the same testing system which produces the best outcome. Because of this, the Curion Score™ covers the majority of desired categories and can provide comparable scores relative to studies that were not done through Curion.

There are certain study criteria that must be met to perform the calculation. If you are interested in reviewing Curion Scores™ for past projects, please reach out to us on our website by filling out the form on the bottom of this page.

Our requirement is a minimum of 50 product scores per category. However, in the rare case where the minimum is not met, we provide options available to help build out the category.

Yes. For Curion to produce a Curion Score™, we must obtain the client signature on a Data Consent Form, which allows Curion to use your anonymized data to calculate the score.

Reach out to your Global Strategy Director or Client Services Director, otherwise reach out on our website to learn more. As your partner, we will be there to guide the process and work side-by-side with you, from start to finish.

The minimum requirements to get a Curion Score™ are:

• Any CLT/HUT studies.
• Signatures required from client on our Curion Score™ Data Consent Form.

The Curion Score™ is meant to be an important supplemental guide using sensory research for final decision making prior to go-to-market. Although a lot of research and analysis is packed into the Curion Score™ genetics, it is not used as a guide for predicting or forecasting purchase intents. 

There are numerous factors that influence the market success and consumer purchases of a product, including positioning and distribution, product price, available promotions, and much more. The Curion Score™ measures exclusively product performance in the marketplace. 

This measure is extremely important as it can help diagnose successful and poor performance in market products and uncover insights that can be used toward improving product sales predictions.