CPG concept testing is a structured read on whether a product concept holds before money is committed to it. Gravity scores a concept across eight dimensions — whitespace, consumer language, format fit, claims, ingredient logic, competitive positioning, business-model risk and founder readiness — against 21,170 classified U.S. market signals, and returns a go, refine or pause recommendation. A Gravity Scan costs $500 and returns in minutes.
Is this concept commercially coherent — and if not, what has to change before it is?
Most concept testing answers whether people say they like something. The more expensive question is whether the concept has a defensible position at all: whether the whitespace is real, whether the claim is already saturated, whether the format matches the occasion, and whether the economics survive the channel.
And, just as usefully, who it is not for.
Eight dimensions, each scored and sourced against 21,170 classified U.S. market signals across 18 CPG categories.
| Dimension | What it reads |
|---|---|
| Whitespace Validation | Whether the space the concept is aiming at is genuinely open, already crowded, or open for a reason. |
| Consumer Language & Signals | The words real buyers use, what they repeatedly complain about, and what they actually repurchase. |
| Format Fit | Whether the format matches category norms, COGS reality, and how the product is actually consumed. |
| Claims & Language | Claim saturation, regulatory exposure, and whether the positioning still reads as differentiated. |
| Ingredient Logic | Sourcing credibility, dose credibility, and whether the ingredient story survives scrutiny. |
| Competitive Positioning | Who you are actually pricing and positioning against, including the brands you have not found yet. |
| Business-Model Risk | Burn exposure, time to proof, and whether the unit economics survive the channel you are aiming at. |
| Founder Readiness | A directional read on operator capacity and go-to-market readiness for this specific move. |
A Gravity Intelligence Brief: every dimension scored and sourced, an overall opportunity score, a go / refine / pause recommendation, and a recommended first move. Where evidence is thin, the brief says so and caps the score rather than inflating it.
Early-stage founders are the case this was built for, because they are the ones for whom a wrong concept is not a line item — it is the company.
A read is only as credible as the boundaries around it.
Gravity does not license proprietary paid databases. Public excerpts from firms such as Euromonitor, SPINS, NielsenIQ, Mintel or Circana are read as public excerpts, not as licensed data.
Gravity is not a consumer panel. It runs no surveys and uses no synthetic respondents — it reads behaviour that already happened in public.
Gravity reads the U.S. market. A read on another market would be inference, not evidence.
A Gravity read is a decision input, not a guarantee. It reports what the evidence supports and says plainly where the evidence is thin.
CPG concept testing evaluates a product concept — its positioning, format, claims and competitive context — before the concept is built. Traditional concept testing asks a recruited sample whether they would buy. Gravity instead reads what the market has already demonstrated across public evidence, and returns a scored diagnosis with a recommendation.
In practice the terms are used interchangeably. Where they differ: testing usually implies putting a stimulus in front of respondents and measuring reaction; validation implies checking a concept against market conditions. Gravity does the second, which is why it can run before a product, a brand, or a budget exists.
A Gravity Scan is $500 and returns in minutes. The Reviewed Gravity Brief is $1,500 within three business days and includes senior review plus a live session. Ask Gravity answers one focused question free.
It is designed for exactly that point. Gravity needs a concept, not a company — no U.S. entity, trademark, formulation or inventory required. The read is most valuable while the decisions are still reversible and cheap to change.
Traditional research fields new primary data to your specification over weeks for five figures. Gravity structures evidence that already exists and returns a decision in minutes for $500. It is an earlier, cheaper, narrower job — it does not replace a licensed dataset, and it does not claim to.
No. Every signal traces back to a real public artefact — a review, a listing, a transcript, a document, a retailer assortment. AI classifies and cross-references that evidence; it does not invent respondents.
A Gravity Intelligence Brief: all eight dimensions scored and sourced, an overall opportunity score, a clear go/refine/pause recommendation, and a recommended first move. A full worked example is published free and ungated.
It gets reported as thin. Scores are capped rather than inflated when data is sparse, and the brief says which findings are directional versus well-evidenced. Overstating confidence on weak evidence would make the whole read worthless.
Gustavo Nader, founder of Aterra Studio and co-founder of AMAZ — a functional beverage brand distributed through Whole Foods, Erewhon and Sprouts, and an Expo West Top 5 pick.
Written and maintained by Gustavo Nader, founder of Aterra Studio and co-founder of AMAZ. Figures on this page are drawn from the Gravity corpus and from Aterra's published pricing.
Published 2026-08-05 · Last reviewed 2026-08-05 · Methodology · Sample brief