TL;DR
A Usage & Attitudes study maps how people actually behave in a category: what they buy, why they choose it, and where the category falls short. This template covers gut associations, purchase drivers, brand repertoire, and occasion mapping, with an on-camera pantry tour to ground the conversation in real behavior rather than claimed habits. Use the plain-text template at the end to run this study AI-moderated across any category.
What Usage & Attitude research actually tells you
A U&A study is the foundational read on a category. It answers who buys, why they buy, how they choose between options, and what role the category plays in their broader routine.
The value is in grounding self-reported behavior against physical evidence. A pantry or shelf tour, filmed on camera, checks what someone says against what they actually keep at home. The gap between the two is often the most useful finding in the whole study.
This template also separates awareness from repertoire. Naming a brand unprompted is not the same as buying it regularly, and the two get confused constantly in category research.
What this template covers
Seventeen questions across one section. The logic flows in five stages:
Warm up on gut associations with the category
Map purchase behavior, decision drivers, and the category's role in a wider routine
Capture unaided brand recall, then brand preference and associations
Explore motivations, occasions, and needs driving category use
Ground the conversation with an on-camera pantry tour and close on unmet needs
Question five is the unaided brand recall moment. It must run before any brand list appears, since naming a brand yourself would contaminate spontaneous salience. Question six then shows a brand list to capture preference, deliberately sequenced after the unaided question, not before it.
Questions eleven through thirteen are the pantry tour: participants film what they actually keep at home, then narrate their favorite product on camera. Question seventeen closes on white space, the gap between what the category currently offers and what would fully satisfy the need.
How to set up this study for your category
A few stetup rules:
Swap the category and brand list options in question six for your own category and competitive set
Recruit a mix of heavy, light, and lapsed category users, not just current buyers
Confirm participants can access their pantry, cupboard, or storage area on camera before fielding
The camera requirement means this study only works on mobile. Build that into your screener and participant instructions upfront.
Where Usage & Attitude research goes wrong
Three failure modes to watch for:
Skipping the unaided recall sequence. If a brand list appears before question five, you lose the spontaneous salience read entirely.
Treating awareness as loyalty. A brand that comes to mind is not necessarily a brand someone buys. Always separate the two explicitly.
Rushing the pantry tour. The physical evidence is the point of this study. If participants film too quickly, you lose the detail that makes the behavioral data useful.
Three failure modes to watch for:
Running Usage & Attitude studies with Conveo
Conveo's AI moderator handles the camera-based sections without a human moderator present, prompting participants to slow down, show product labels clearly, and narrate what they are showing.
Follow-up depth adjusts automatically, from surface scan on simple questions to deep dive on brand loyalty and unmet needs
Video footage from the pantry tour is analyzed alongside the transcript, so visual evidence and spoken answers are captured together
Thematic analysis surfaces repertoire patterns and unmet needs across participants without manual coding
Want to see how this template runs inside Conveo?
