When it comes to marketing your products, making sure that you can substantiate your claims is vital. All too often companies overclaim and fall foul of the Advertising Standards Authority or Clearcast. Our ‘Claim Substantiation’ course explains how to design & analyse trials to support product claims.
Claim Substantiation Course
In February, we were joined by scientists, technologists and engineers from around the UK on our first ‘Claim Substantiation’ course of the year at the Holiday Inn in Reading. Although they were from a variety of industries ranging from cosmetics and cleaning products to lubricants and fuels, they all had one thing in common. They all wanted to know how to design & analyse trials to support product claims.
Companies represented on the course included Smith and Nephew, Ayton Global Research Ltd, Deb Group, Avon Cosmetics Ltd, Atomic Weapon Establishment, Reckitt Benckiser, Afton Chemical Ltd., and Shell Global Solutions (UK).
Lecturers with experience
Course leader Dick Boddy was joined by Chris Gummer and Joyce Ryan who both have an extraordinary amount of experience in Claim Substantiation.
Chris has over 20 years’ experience as a senior technologist and research fellow with Procter & Gamble. He’s also a technical consultant for Clearcast, who regulate UK Broadcast advertising and an expert panel consultant for the Advertising Standards Authority. So he could advise delegates on what would and wouldn’t be accepted.
Joyce has 11 years’ experience at Colgate Palmolive and over 20 years as an independent consultant using her own salon for hair care trials. She also has a seat on the British Standards Committee for Sensory analysis.
Free statistical consultancy
As part of the course we were able to offer free statistical consultancy during and after tutorial sessions and helped to answer numerous questions from those attending the course including:
- How long can you use the word “New” in a claim?
- How do you get a scale for greyness with an industrial cleaning product?
- Can you analyse a paired design (each subject comparing two treatments) when, due to an operational misunderstanding, a third of the subjects only gave one assessment?
Positive Feedback
It was an excellent course with a great deal of participation and cross pollination of ideas. Here’s what attendees told us
“I enjoyed the course and have put the stats methods to use straight away.” Marc Ingram, R&D Engineering Specialist, Afton Chemical Ltd.
“It was very helpful in helping us understand the testing we are doing and how to design the correct type of test” Gabby Ambler, R&D Scientist
“The Claims Substantiation course has been invaluable to us and I’ve left with 5 pages of training and development notes. Our statistician praised the resource material and found a great balance between topics” RA
“I enjoyed the training very much and found the course material to be very comprehensive.” CF
Register now for the next Claim Substantiation course
Our next “Claim Substantiation” course will run from 10th-11th October 2017 in Reading. If you would like to attend, please contact us and we will reserve a place for you.