Product concept testing is a vital component of the innovation process. It provides critical insights that set promising new product ideas on the path to success. It also prevents lackluster ideas from progressing further, saving significant investments. This article explores the importance of making concept testing an integral part of innovation workflows and how it positively impacts key measures such as new product revenue and customer satisfaction.
The Role of Concept Testing in Innovation
Concept testing fills a vital, multi-faceted role within the stages of the innovation process. Concept testing focuses valuable consumer input on early ideas and new technology directions being explored, unlike other forms of testing that validate existing products.
It fits into the front end of innovation. This is before significant investments are made in design, engineering, manufacturing capabilities, or market launch activities. The data derived at this nascent stage helps guide product development in several key ways:
Assess Appeal and Differentiate Against Competitors:
Target consumers give direct feedback on what resonates or doesn’t versus current market offerings. This highlights gaps where the concept satisfies unmet needs better. It identifies troubling weak areas that need refinement. Potential customers can uncover blind spots that internal teams might overlook, highlighting the importance of an external perspective.
Evaluate Mass Market Potential:
Concept testing polls a representative sample to determine broader appeal. It also identifies adoption barriers across various consumer demographics. This estimates volume opportunity. It guides product refinements to widen accessibility to more groups. Testing various positioning statements can reveal messaging that resonates better with mainstream buyers.
Inform Commercial Viability:
Consumer interest levels signal whether intended pricing aligns with perceived value at each stage of the product innovation process. Pricing sensitivity checks uncover thresholds for mass adoption. Doing pricing variation tests with a few target price points gives data to find the optimal balance between affordability and profit margins. Market sizing analysis combines pricing, demographic demand, and volume estimates to build a business case for investment at different phases of bringing an innovation to market.
Shape Positioning and Messaging:
Testing marketing stimulus materials reveals what best conveys the core conceived benefit to consumers in a crowded, noisy marketplace. What messaging cuts through competitors? What positioning would consumers advocate to peers? This guides branding, packaging, and campaigns to make sure customers understand what problem the product solves for them.
Prioritize Product Capabilities:
Intended features can be ranked by consumer-validated importance. This focuses product development resources on delivering what matters most to customers. It avoids expending effort on nice-to-haves. Trade-off tests also uncover what capabilities buyers value over others to guide tough capability decisions.
The Benefits of Investing in Concept Testing
While an added cost, concept testing provides exponential, tangible returns versus developing products in a vacuum without early consumer input. The upfront modest investment in gathering market feedback minimizes extensive waste and risk later from products missing the mark. Beyond powering better innovation success rates overall, proven benefits include:
- Reduced R&D waste: Early consumer data minimizes resources squandered on product aspects that end up inconsequential to adoption and satisfaction. Uncovering product misconceptions early allows more time to correct them. Feature creep is avoided by tying requests directly to customer value.
- Shortened timelines: Locking in high-potential concepts reduces false starts, pivots, and dramatic reworks that cause delays. When customers validate core positioning elements, it creates alignment for streamlined, accelerated development between departments. Product managers gain facts to push back on arbitrary executive opinions too.
- Market share gains: Products deeply rooted in consumer insights increase adoption velocity, supporting first-year market share 2X higher than industry benchmarks. Addressing explicit needs voiced by customers strongly connects to prompting trial. Positive word-of-mouth significantly contributes to raising awareness.
- Higher profitability: Increased appeal and willingness-to-pay expands margin headroom relative to costs. Combined with accelerated sales momentum, this grows profits by 60%+ over products created without concept testing. Making sure the product delivers outstanding value versus price builds expansion opportunities.
The measurable economic gains unlocked by concept testing make it an essential stage of experimentation for manufacturers. The insights it provides into the fuzzy front end of innovation guide enterprise investments. They help to choose the ventures with the greatest probability of both customer and company success. Even smaller enterprises on a budget can gain valuable signals from inexpensive concept test methods.
The Positive Impact on Customer Satisfaction
Concept testing provides customer data that feeds directly into designing compelling product experiences that fulfill wants and needs. Incorporating direct customer feedback into designs inherently elevates relevance and usability. Good design also triggers positive emotions, builds brand affinity, and sparks referral and repurchase intent. This combination elevates customer satisfaction metrics linked to profitable long-term growth, like:
Net Promoter Score:
Customers receptive to referring brands to peers indicate higher satisfaction.
Customer satisfaction surveys:
Meeting explicit needs uncovered in concept testing addresses proactive sources of discontent proactively.
Review ratings:
Reviews ultimately validate if your product delivered on the promised value proposition that resonated in testing.
Sales referrals:
Positive word-of-mouth comes from happy customers with needs fulfilled.
Uncovering Pain Points to Spark Innovation
Concept testing also uncovers consumer friction points, unmet needs, emerging trends, and blockers to purchase. These insights spark adjacent innovations to:
Develop new products addressing pain points: Sequels and spin-offs extend franchises into new areas with inherent demand.
Refine existing products to better meet customer jobs-to-be-done: Build loyalty through constant improvements focused on consumer value.
Shift to more relevant technologies: Identify outdated tech limiting appeal to guide investments to refresh experiences.
Adopt new business models like subscriptions: Understand modern buying preferences around access vs. ownership.
This leads to expanded market share, higher lifetime customer value, and more sources of company growth. Iteratively testing concepts creates built-in product roadmaps for the future, centered around solving customer problems.
Over 25% of profits across industries come from products launched in the past three years. Concept testing is the catalyst enabling relevant innovation. It provides the customer intuition necessary in markets evolving relentlessly.
Conclusion
Out of 30,000 new yearly consumer product launches, only about 1,500 survive. Concept testing maximizes innovation ROI. It identifies which ideas consumers want and will use. This consumer’s voice aligns teams around high-potential products worth the development investment based on the market. Testing concepts also provides actionable feedback.
It helps iterate on weaknesses and magnify strengths revealed once ideas leave internal discussions. Ultimately this elevates customer adoption and satisfaction through compelling, purpose-built offerings. By proactively halting doomed ventures, concept testing saves substantial wasted time and expense. For any manufacturer serious about profitable innovation, it needs to be an essential process.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What exactly is concept testing?
Concept testing presents an early-stage product idea to target consumers to evaluate appeal, messaging effectiveness, competitive differentiation, intent to purchase, and ideal pricing. This discovery process aims to gather evidence around potential and commercial viability requiring further investigation.
2. What are some examples of concept testing approaches?
Popular concept test methods include concept statements, product sketches or renderings, and early prototypes. Marketing stimuli, like positioning statements and pricing scenarios, are also used. Online surveys, remote interviews, digital focus groups, and customer observation sessions then gather feedback. Quantitative data and qualitative reactions collect different insights.
3. When should you conduct concept testing in product development?
The greatest value comes from validating concepts before investing heavily in product design and development. Testing concepts iteratively from early ideation strengthens product-market fit adjustments. It also avoids over-engineering products that customers don’t want. But adjustments can still occur later to course-correct major issues.