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Introduction

How to Run Your First Consumer Study in Under 5 Minutes

Darron Jennings

Traditional consumer research takes weeks and costs thousands. With Gustoso, you can get purchase intent data from 100 AI-powered respondents before your coffee gets cold. Here's exactly how.

Step 1: Create Your Study

From your dashboard, click New Study and choose Quick Evaluation — this is the fastest way to test a single asset like a product image, ad creative, or packaging design.

Give your study a clear name. Something like "Spring Campaign — Hero Image Test" works well. You'll thank yourself later when you have a dozen studies in your dashboard.

Step 2: Set Your Question

Gustoso comes pre-loaded with the standard purchase intent question: "How likely are you to purchase this product?" with a five-point scale from Very Unlikely to Very Likely. For your first study, this default is perfect. It maps directly to the SSR (Semantic Similarity Rating) methodology that powers our analysis.

You can always customize the question text or add more questions later, but for now, keep it simple.

Step 3: Define Your Audience

This is where it gets interesting. The Audience step lets you shape who evaluates your asset. You can configure:

  • Age range — Target 18–34 for a Gen Z product, or go broad with 25–65 for mass market.
  • Gender — Select specific genders or leave it open for a balanced panel.
  • Income levels — Focus on your actual target market. A luxury product should be evaluated by higher-income respondents.
  • Regions — Narrow by geography if your product is regional.

For your first study, we recommend starting broad — maybe 25–54, mixed gender, all income levels. This gives you a general population read. You can always run a follow-up targeting a specific demographic slice.

Step 4: Upload Your Asset

Drag and drop your image into the Assets step. This is what the AI respondents will evaluate — a product photo, an ad mockup, a packaging render, whatever you want tested. Gustoso supports standard image formats (PNG, JPG, WebP).

One asset is all you need for a quick evaluation. If you want to compare multiple creatives head-to-head, you can upload several, but for your first run, keep it to one.

Step 5: Set Your Sample Size

The Sample & Cost step is where you choose how many AI respondents evaluate your asset. The minimum is 100 — and with your GUSTOSO200 promo code, that's completely free. No credit card required.

100 respondents gives you a statistically meaningful read on purchase intent. It's the equivalent of a quick-turn research panel, delivered in minutes instead of weeks.

Step 6: Review and Launch

The final step shows you a summary of everything: your question, audience configuration, asset, and sample size. Accept the terms, click Launch Study, and Gustoso gets to work.

Behind the scenes, our SSR engine generates 100 unique personas matching your demographic criteria. Each persona views your asset, provides a natural language response, and that response is scored against calibrated anchor statements using semantic similarity. The result is a Likert-scale distribution that's directly comparable to traditional human panel data.

Step 7: Read Your Results

Your study typically completes within a few minutes. You'll see:

  • Overall purchase intent score — a clear percentage breakdown across the five-point scale.
  • Per-respondent detail — individual persona responses so you can understand the why behind the numbers.
  • Downloadable report — export your results for presentations or stakeholder reviews.

A strong result shows heavy weighting toward "Likely" and "Very Likely." If you see the distribution clustering around "Neutral" or below, that's a signal to iterate on your creative before spending real media dollars.

What's Next?

Once you've run your first study, try:

  • Testing variants — upload two versions of the same ad and compare scores.
  • Narrowing your audience — rerun the same asset targeting just your core demographic.
  • Adding custom questions — go beyond purchase intent with questions about brand perception, clarity, or emotional response.

The best consumer research is iterative. Gustoso makes each iteration fast and affordable enough that you can test early, test often, and launch with confidence.

Ready to run your first study? Sign up free and use code GUSTOSO200 for 200 evaluation credits — enough to test your first campaign today.

For deeper walkthroughs with screenshots of every step, check out our detailed guides: