Offering everything your customers want sounds ideal — but for most businesses, it’s simply not realistic. Limited resources, shelf space, and production capabilities mean organizations must make strategic choices about which products, services, or features to bring to market.
TURF (Total Unduplicated Reach and Frequency) analysis helps businesses uncover the optimal mix of offerings to maximize customer reach. Whether you’re expanding a product line or refining existing options, TURF analysis uses data to guide smarter, more efficient decisions.
In this blog, we’ll break down what TURF analysis is, when to use it, and walk through real-world examples to show how it works in action.
TURF, or Total Unduplicated Reach and Frequency, is an advanced analytical technique used to determine how to reach the largest number of unique customers with a limited number of products, services, or features.
It’s particularly useful when a business can’t offer everything and needs to prioritize what to include in a portfolio, menu, or feature set.
TURF helps answer the question: Which combination will give us the widest reach?
Together, reach and frequency help organizations find the most efficient mix of offerings to serve the largest audience—without stretching resources too thin.
Conjoint analysis helps you understand how people make trade-offs between different features of a product (like price, flavor, or size) by simulating real purchase decisions. TURF analysis, on the other hand, identifies the best combination of products or features that will reach the most people, focusing on overall appeal and coverage rather than individual trade-offs.
For a deeper dive, check out our in-depth guide on conjoint analysis.
Let’s pretend you work for a well-known beverage company, FizzCo. You are preparing to launch a new sparkling water line.
Your team has 10 potential flavors in mind, including:
Unfortunately, due to budget and production limitations, you can only afford to launch 5 flavors.
FizzCo’s product teams are faced with a tough decision: How do they select the 5 best flavors to ensure they capture the largest market segment while still offering a diverse selection?
FizzCo hires a market research company to conduct an online survey with 1,000 consumers, asking them to rate their preference for each of the 10 flavors. The team then inputs this data into a TURF analysis model to calculate the unduplicated reach for each flavor and combination. The goal is to choose a mix of 5 flavors that maximizes unique consumer reach and minimizes redundancy.
The survey analysis will show individual flavor preferences such as:
We can then assume that if a particular flavor is among the top two most liked by a person, then we call it appealing to them ✔. Therefore, these scores can be used to identify which flavor will be the most or the second most liked by each respondent:
Next, we evaluate different combinations of flavors and calculate two key metrics:
This tells the beverage company that everyone likes at least one of the lime flavor and one of the mango flavor. This equates to a 100% reach therefore, FizzCo should at least launch the combination of these two flavors for maximum reach and consumer appeal.
TURF analysis offers powerful insights that help businesses make smarter, data-driven decisions about what to offer — and what to leave out.
By analyzing the reach and overlap of different product or service combinations, TURF identifies the mix that will appeal to the greatest number of unique customers.
This is especially helpful when businesses are constrained by shelf space, development budgets, or marketing bandwidth. Rather than guessing which options will perform best, TURF provides a clear, evidence-based path forward.
Key benefits of TURF analysis include:
It is best suited for situations where your business must choose a limited number of offerings while still aiming to satisfy as much of your target market as possible. Here are more tangible use cases our market research company has conducted TURF for organizations.
When you can’t offer every product or feature, TURF helps determine which combination will maximize market reach.
For example, let’s say a beverage company is launching a new line of flavored sparkling waters. With only five flavors allowed in the initial rollout, TURF analysis identifies the flavor mix (e.g., lime, peach, black cherry, mango, and cucumber) that will appeal to the widest range of unique consumers.
Recommended Reading: How to Optimize Product Lines with TURF
For restaurants and quick-service restaurants (QSRs), streamlining the menu is often a strategic move to reduce operational complexity, improve kitchen efficiency, and lower costs.
By using TURF, restaurant managers can evaluate consumer preferences and identify the optimal combination of food and drink items that will reach the largest portion of their target market. This means understanding which items attract the most customers and which ones might be unnecessarily overlapping in their appeal.
For example, a QSR may need to decide which of its 12 sandwich options to keep as part of a simplified menu. TURF analysis will show which combinations of sandwiches can satisfy the most customers, without repeating flavors or similar ingredients across multiple options.
Plus, it can also indicate if a combination of items (e.g., a burger and a vegetarian wrap) can serve distinct customer segments without duplication, allowing the restaurant to optimize its menu for a wider audience.
Marketers are tasked with reaching as many consumers as possible without over-saturating them with the same message. With an array of media channels and ad creatives at their disposal—ranging from social media and digital ads to TV commercials and print—selecting the right mix to engage a wide audience is both an art and a science.
TURF analysis helps marketers identify the optimal combination of media platforms and ad creatives that maximizes audience reach while minimizing redundancy. By analyzing consumer preferences and media consumption patterns, TURF can reveal which combinations will capture the largest unique audience, ensuring that marketing budgets are allocated efficiently.
TURF analysis is conducted using data from standard multiple-choice questions in a market research survey. The data is analyzed using statistical software, which calculates a reach for every combination included in the survey.
The survey data can be analyzed for a variety of different scenarios. For example, an organization might want to determine how to optimize market reach for a portfolio of 3, 4, and 5 products.
This would allow the organization to determine how many products they want to offer, and what those products would be.
Here is a brief overview of the process:
Ready to make smarter decisions with limited resources? Our team at Drive Research specializes in custom TURF analysis to help you identify the most effective combination of products, services, features, or messaging for your audience.
Whether you’re launching a new product, refining a menu, or building a marketing campaign, we’ll deliver the insights you need to maximize reach and ROI — without the guesswork.
Get in touch with our TURF analysis experts today. Let’s uncover the optimal mix to grow your market impact.
