Although she doesn’t know it, the woman standing in front of the juice cooler at the Safeway market on Hayden and Chaparral is about to make a decision that could change the course of a multi-million dollar product launch and, more importantly, make or break the career of the man standing just about four feet directly behind her.

“This is the kind of thing I like to watch,” whispers Rick Zim me rman, as the woman – a matronly-looking gal in her late forties, wearing an abbreviated beehive hairdo and a loud floral-patterned sun dress – bends down to read the label on the container of Tropicana Ho me style orange juice then straightens up again to render her decision on which carton to toss in her shopping cart.

Zim me rman scopes out her every move like an on-the-make horndog with a thing for portly redheads, looking like George Costanza about to pounce on an unsuspecting object of so me misguided infatuation.

Finally, the woman selects a carton of Tropicana Pure Premium, No Pulp, and Zim me rman is crestfallen. “I don’t think she even saw us, because we’re on the top shelf,” he says. “The best place to be is the eye-level shelf. And Tropicana has that all locked up in this store.”

As the senior V.P. of marketing and innovation for Sunny Delight Beverages, Zim me rman has a lot riding on the fruit juice decisions of the everyday housewife. For 24 years, Zim me rman worked in brand manage me nt for the consu me r goods giant Proctor & Gamble, overseeing the international marketing of everything from Pringles to Head & Shoulders.

When the Bo ston-based private equity investor J . W. Childs spun off Sunny D from P&G in 2004, Zim me rman beca me , in effect, one of six principals in what’s now a fledgling start-up company. “We each have sizeable financial invest me nts in this,” he notes.

On this particular Thursday, the Cincinnati businessman is visiting the Valley to launch the test-marketing rollout of FruitSimple, Sunny Delight’s new line of smoothie drinks.

Like many manufacturers before it, Sunny Delight has chosen the Phoenix area as the optimal location to test the new product before going national with the brand, which it expects to do in 2008. Walking down Safeway’s expansive frozen food aisle, Zim me rman is quick to point out the products of many other big companies who’ve co me to regard Phoenix as one of the best places to test consu me r goods.

“A&W ice cream – you don’t see them anywhere else,” says Zim me rman, whose job has taken him through supermarkets all over the U.S. and Europe. “Dryers, Bryers, Lucerne, Safeway Select. J ust look at the variety. There’s stuff here that you will not see anywhere else in the world. Now, let’s go check out the spaghetti sauce.”

Since the ‘80s, makers of new consu me r products have favored Phoenix as a testing ground for a variety of reasons: a good me lting-pot population made up of transplants from all over the country, a strong mix of retail outlets, and me dia exposure relatively isolated from other big cities. For Zim me rman’s company, it also helps that Arizonans know fruit. “People here know what a strawberry is supposed to taste like,” he says admiringly.

Because of this, Valley shoppers are regularly given a first shot at products not yet available to the rest of the country – and their purchasing behaviors are closely watched and analyzed in marketing boardrooms. Often, participants are as unaware of their influence as the woman browsing the Safeway juice cooler.

But others have learned to work the standing to their advantage, regularly carting ho me free sample product and sitting in on weekly focus groups in exchange for a quick $75 to $300 check.

“We’re always looking for what we call ‘passionate providers,’” Zim me rman says. “Not fanatics or people who follow all the trends, but the mainstream moms who care about buying good products for their family. And that’s the kind of people we find in Phoenix.”

“Professional Respondents”

Darlene Pagliarello can rattle off the phone numbers of every top marketing survey company in town.

“WestGroup is a good one,” says the harried single mother of three, answering the door of her Northeast Phoenix ho me with a three-year-old nephew and teenaged son in tow. “I usually talk to Lisa, but she don’t work there no more. Arizona Market Research, Focus Marketing, Plaza Research. I call them all every few days, to see if they’re doing a survey I can get in on.”

Most market research companies employ sophisticated systems to weed out people like Darlene, dubbed “professional respondents” by leaders in the field.

“We normally screen out people who try to do these on a regular basis,” says Glenn Iwata, executive V.P. of WestGroup Research, the Valley’s oldest market research firm. “Because they know the system, they know how to play the system, and they’re no longer an unbiased source. They’re the kind of people who’ll say, ‘Oh yeah, I have a dog’ – when they really don’t – just to qualify for a dog food survey, and maybe make 100 bucks.”

Each of the companies limits the amount of ti me s you can take part in a survey, usually requiring four to six months between participation, and Iwata says his company routinely turns down calls from unsolicited volunteers, preferring to work off its own database compiled from available demographics and purchasing records.

Compensation varies per survey: a soy sauce test may net only forty dollars, but a survey on a higher mark-up item may bring considerably more. A woman who claims to be friends with a head recruiter at Schlesinger Associates, a national recruiter of focus group participants with an office in Phoenix, says her husband participated in a five-night survey on automobiles. “At the end of the last session,” she wrote in an Internet forum, “they gave him an envelope with $3,000 in it. They also feed you while you’re there.”

For the participant whose opinions and personality tends to dominate the focus group, the rewards can be even sweeter. Many firms, including Proctor & Gamble, now use focus groups like A me rican Idol competitions, zeroing in on the one participant who best personifies their target demographic and then following her around for several days, paying reality show dough to observe her product interactions at ho me and springing for the bill at the grocery store.

“That’s how we got our product’s na me , in fact,” says Zim me rman. “We were originally going to call it Fruitful. But then this woman from the focus group na me d Amanda, who had three kids and said she had little ti me to read labels in the grocery store, kept talking about ‘keep it simple.’ We went, ‘Whoa! There’s our na me !’ And she beca me our icon.”

Will Pass Gas for Cash

Back in the day, just becoming part of the great A me rican marketing machine and being able to tell fellow shoppers, “I helped na me that product!” was incentive enough.

“At the inception of market research, back in the ‘40s and ‘50s, it was rare to be asked to take a survey,” says Simon Chadwick, for me r CEO of the venerable NOP Research in the U.K. and now partner at Cambiar, LLC in Phoenix. “And people would volunteer their ti me very willingly, because they were flattered to be asked.”

Now, says Chadwick, too many people have been caught up in the “tuna net” of direct marketing, and consider calls to participate in research studies an annoyance – or, worse yet, a con job.

“There’s been a lot of what we call ‘sugging’ – ‘selling under the guise’ of research,” he says, “which has really tainted what we do.”

The FTC and FCC’s “Do Not Call” law to curb unsolicited telemarketing helped filter out the bad guys, Chadwick says, since verified research companies are exempt from the registry. “Now if the phone rings, you know it’s a legitimate research company.”

Still, more and more of the “real people” companies like Zim me rman’s counting on tests to help provide feedback on their brands are suffering from what the research industry is calling “opinion fatigue.” At a recent Chicago summit of 30 top market research executives, Chadwick delivered a speech noting that 50 percent of all survey responses now co me from less than five percent of the population. Consu me rs under 25 – a key demographic to many companies – have beco me hardest to reach , as a third of them now only have cell phones.

“We’ve got to make the process more interesting, involving and engaging to them,” Chadwick says. “Because these days, ti me is at a premium.”

New me thods involve using Web 2.0 strategies to give consu me rs more choices and more control over how they take a survey. “The nice thing about online research is you can take half of the survey now, save it, and co me back and do the rest later,” Chadwick says. “Conven ience matters. It’s all about what works best for you .”

Still, the traditional me thods remain the most widely used. Sunny Delight’s ga me plan is to keep stocking Valley supermarkets with its new smoothies for four months and then enlist a local research company to place calls until they find people who’ve tried the product – a ti me -consuming process Zim me rman says can require upwards of 1,000 calls to find the six to eight people they’ll then invite to sit in a focus group.

Even then, it can be tough to talk busy people into gathering in a mid-town conference room with a one-way mirror and discussing things like blended mangos and po me granates for an hour and a half.

“If it’s a subject they’re personally interested in,” says Chadwick, “people generally have no trouble whatsoever giving their opinions, and actually enjoy seeing the results of their opinions coming to fruition.”

Unfortunately, the more exciting surveys – picking a new flavor of Coke, perhaps, or discovering the most revolutionary product since the proverbial sliced bread – are few and far between.

“We don’t get a lot of the ‘sexy’ products,” says WestGroup’s Iwata, whose facility located on Ca me lback utilizes three rooms for focus groups. “We did a test for Beano – it helps you with gas,” he laughs. “One ti me we did a test for an incontinence product. Do you know what it’s like to sit in a roomful of people with incontinence?”

So me thing to think about the next ti me you stroll in a Valley grocery or drug store, at least. So me where in the city, so me one you know may have squir me d uncomfortably in a mirrored room so that you can be gas-free. “You na me a product with any level of success, and there’s been so me test marketing and focus groups done on it,” Iwata says. “You have to these days. You can’t afford not to.”