Surveying children and young consumers: the power of spontaneous responses R3MSCORE

Product testing with children and young people poses a methodological challenge that is well known to research teams: how can reliable, rich, and discriminating responses be obtained from a target group whose verbal and attentional abilities are naturally more limited than those of adults?

R3MSCORE offers a simple, robust solution that is perfectly suited to these young target groups: a single question, combined with automated emotional analysis, to transform young people’s spontaneity into operational insights.

A simple, intuitive, and unbiased method

At the heart of our protocol is a single question: “Tell me the first three words that come to mind.”

This deliberately simple and non-directive instruction allows children to express themselves without constraints or closed-ended questions. This allows us to capture the spontaneous expression of their lived experience:

• No induction: children are not confined to lists of attributes.
• No cognitive filter: we access their immediate reaction.
• No overload: a quick test, perfectly suited to young people’s attention span.

The approach can be easily integrated into any type of protocol:

• Stand-alone (agile screening)
• Integrated into existing questionnaires
• Adapted to tests of products, concepts, designs, packaging, or recipes

Emotional weighting of words

An exclusive emotional analysis model assigns each word a weight that reflects both its emotional intensity and its valence (positive or negative).

This algorithm takes several criteria into account: grammatical nature, enunciative posture, consensus or divergence among respondents, etc.

The overall R3MSCORE indicator is the sum of the emotional activation (positive and negative) generated by the product experience. We then visualize the contribution of each group of words to this overall score.

The entire scoring system is continuously enriched and calibrated using our proprietary linguistic models, which are fed by more than 4,000 stimuli tested in over 20 countries.

Measurable benefits:

• Enhanced discrimination: ability to detect differences even when overall assessment scores are similar.
• Identifiable weak signals: rapid detection of factors influencing acceptance or rejection, including sensitive aspects (nutrition, taste, texture, etc.).
• Expressiveness tailored to the child target audience: concrete, vivid words that can be directly used by R&D and marketing teams.
• Actionable and operational insights: summary of key emotional and functional drivers.

A SaaS platform designed for research teams

Beyond the methodology, R3MSCORE is also a robust and agile technology platform offering comprehensive management of emotional research projects:

• 100% SaaS DIY interface
  Launch data collection and manage projects independently, from questionnaire creation to results analysis.
• Multi-device compatible
  Mobile, tablet, desktop, with access via link, QR code, or website/app integration.
• Immediate analysis of results
  Interactive dashboards, aggregated indicators, and analysis of verbatim responses.
• International access
  Multi-country deployment with access to more than 140 million panelists in over 130 countries.
• Export raw or enriched data
  Ability to retrieve results at the individual level for further analysis.

R3MSCORE: the agile solution for capturing the emotions of young consumers