Can't Afford Nielsen? Here's the Modern Alternative for CPG Insights

At some point every CPG founder googles “Nielsen pricing,” sees the number, and shuts the laptop. You know the giants don’t guess. They test with Nielsen, Kantar, or another enterprise panel that eats most of a seed round. But when your entire first production run could cost less than a single report, it’s simply not a viable option. You need Nielsen alternatives for small business that still give you predictive consumer insight.

SurveyMonkey shows up in every search. It’s terrific for birthday polls, employee feedback, or gathering opinions from an audience you already have. The trap is believing it can handle high-stakes CPG concept testing.

• You still have to find the audience. SurveyMonkey doesn’t recruit your target shoppers.
• It measures opinions, not behavior. “I like Design A” is useless if consumers actually buy Design B at the shelf.
• Crafting unbiased questions is hard. One leading question can give you false confidence and a warehouse full of unsold inventory.

You’re not hunting for a generic survey tool. You need a concept testing tool for CPG that outputs purchase propensity, not vibes.

Hustle helps. Instagram polls, local tastings, DMs to loyal customers—those efforts keep you close to your audience. But you know the limits: tiny sample sizes, biased respondents, no statistical muscle. They don’t predict new product success at scale.

The third option—and the one fast-growing brands are embracing—is synthetic surveys. That’s what Propensity Guru delivers. It acts like an AI survey for CPG decisions: fast, affordable, and predictive.

1. Describe your consumer. Instead of hunting for “health-conscious millennial moms,” you describe them. Our AI builds a statistically accurate persona.
2. Upload your stimulus. Packaging, claims, positioning, pricing—whatever you’re sweating over.
3. Run the predictive survey. Thousands of synthetic respondents evaluate your stimulus using a structured, multi-question framework rooted in academic research.
4. Read the purchase propensity scores. You walk away knowing which option is statistically more likely to sell. No guesswork. No “likes” chart. Just a decision backed by data.

When founders ask about Propensity Guru vs SurveyMonkey, the answer is simple: one is a general survey builder; the other is a purpose-built packaging testing tool that measures purchase propensity.

• SurveyMonkey: you recruit the audience, you draft the survey, you interpret opinions.
• Propensity Guru: you describe the persona, upload your designs, and get hard numbers on what will actually sell.

Choosing SurveyMonkey keeps you in the dark. Choosing Propensity Guru turns on the lights.

Here’s the modern playbook for market research for CPG startups:

1. Run synthetic surveys to vet concepts, claims, packaging, and positioning.
2. Use focus groups or qualitative sessions after you have data, so you can dig deeper into the “why.”
3. Layer in small in-market pilots to confirm the predictive scores match real-world behavior.
4. Graduate to enterprise panels when you’re tracking nationwide velocity and share of shelf.

That’s how small brands outmaneuver giants without burning cash: test fast, learn faster, launch with confidence.