Typically, a Building Blockssm study is held in a hotel ballroom, social hall, or cafeteria. These spaces provide wide open areas in which the respondents and team members can move freely from task to task. The various tasks to be completed, such as name selection, concept evaluation, product preparation and tasting, are assigned to work tables, or stations. If this is hard to envision, please check out our sample room layout.

The respondents are given the job of "building" a new product in the category of interest. They are introduced to the project in a short briefing. At each task table, or station, the respondent completes a self-administered questionnaire. Members of the Building Blocks^sm team help out, by giving assistance when respondents ask for it, and by helping to manage the stimuli used in the test. The client team members are encouraged to ask additional questions at each station. The answers to these questions help the team to dig deeper and understand consumers' responses to the various stimuli.

Each respondent follows his or her pre-assigned routing sheet in completing the specific tasks. So, some respondents might get to choose a name before sorting benefits; others might try the product after they work on refining the package design. The stimuli are always subject to change. For example, a test could start with a sort and rank of twenty-five names. It might become apparent after two or three sessions that some of the names just aren't being picked. They can either be dropped or replaced with back-up names for the remaining sessions.

Similarly, the questions being asked might change. If the Building Blockssm team determines that additional diagnostic questions need to be asked, they are administered in the remaining interviews. Come to think of it, we can’t remember a Building Blockssm test where the questions were the same during the last session as during the first session!

Some clients like to create a set of probe questions to give their team. Here’s an example of some typical probing questions.