The Lost Art of the Test Market
Back in the ’90s — before data dashboards, digital twins, and real-time analytics — marketers had a beautifully simple tool in their kit: the test town.
The idea was straightforward. You’d pick a city that looked and behaved like the rest of the UK, drop in your shiny new product or advertising campaign, and see what happened. If it bombed in Carlisle or Lincoln, odds were it wouldn’t fly anywhere else. No algorithms, no A/B split tests — just smart geography and a sharp eye on the ground.
Why Carlisle and Lincoln?
It wasn’t random. Carlisle and Lincoln were considered demographically “average” — a perfect snapshot of the UK at the time. Age, income, class, media habits: both towns ticked all the right boxes.
Even better, you could run a neat, self-contained media campaign: local radio, local press, and maybe a bit of outdoor. You didn’t need to go national to get national insights.
The photo here is a little relic from one of those campaigns — a giveaway from when we ran a test for (then P&G-owned) Sunny Delight. We trialled it in Lincoln and Carlisle before rolling it out across the country. Those two towns were the make-or-break stage for what became one of the decade’s most talked-about drinks.
Could We Even Have a Modern Test Town?
Fast forward to today, and you have to wonder: is the idea of the test town even relevant anymore?
With digital media so hyper-targeted, the entire country is now effectively a test market — whether it realises it or not. We don’t need to pick a town; we target personas, segments, lookalike audiences. Algorithms do the heavy lifting. Results roll in almost instantly.
But there’s something charming, even a little romantic, about the idea that once upon a time, the fate of a big national campaign hinged on how it landed in the streets of Lincoln or Carlisle.
Final Thought
We may have swapped postcodes for pixels, but the core challenge remains: figuring out what works, what sticks, and what people actually care about. Maybe the real lost art isn’t the test town itself — but the patience, curiosity, and local intuition that made it work.
