5 reasons why concept testing is important

Marketing textbooks are filled with examples of products or services that flopped when they hit the market.

Take Juicero, for instance. Investors pumped a staggering $120 million into a Wi-Fi-connected juice maker that nobody indicated they wanted or needed. Unsurprisingly, it was scrapped within two years.

Or consider ESPN’s mobile phone service, priced at $400 and lacking handset choice for the target audience. The service was swiftly shut down, and ESPN opted to provide content to Verizon instead.

And who could forget New Coke? Launched in 1985, it remains a major marketing misstep. After only a few weeks, Coca-Cola abandoned the product and reverted to its old formula.

Even some of the world’s most innovative companies have failed to foresee the impact of new launches on their target market. Google, for example, arguably launched its wearable Google Glass concept too soon. Its high price did not help, and it failed to connect with consumers.

Fortunately, there is a way to avoid such failures. By conducting product concept testing before a product launch, businesses can develop their ideas in a safe and controlled space with the target audience.

What is Concept Testing?

Concept testing involves presenting potential product concepts or ideas to a target audience and collecting feedback to assess market potential. The concept can be a new set of product ideas, a redesign, or a rebrand.

Testing methods can be online, such as quantitative surveys or online communities focused on qualitative insights, or face-to-face, such as focus groups or in-depth interviews.

The Role of UX Designers

UX designers play a crucial role in concept testing by employing user-centered design principles. They create interactive prototypes that simulate the user experience, allowing participants to engage with and provide feedback on proposed concepts. UX designers ensure that concepts are intuitive, usable, and aligned with the target audience’s needs. They facilitate user testing sessions, observe interactions, and gather valuable insights to refine the concepts.

The Importance of Concept Testing

Here are the five key reasons why concept testing is so important:

1. Concept Testing Helps Filter Ideas

Concept testing helps you move beyond blue-sky thinking and determine which ideas will be a hit. It provides data that can bring the whole team on board by providing consensus on which projects to develop and which to shelve.

Great concept testing unites teams behind ideas with real potential, eliminating the need for office politics or frustrating ‘design by committee.’ With concept testing, you hear directly from consumers about what will work and what won’t.

Using a range of qualitative and quantitative techniques, you can understand the consumer view of different concepts and explore whether the types of products or services you want to develop will resonate. Employing a range of testing tools enables you to identify the product concepts with the highest appeal and understand how these can be refined. This allows you to move to the next stage of development with confidence.

It’s no overstatement to say that a well-designed, concept-testing survey or a skillfully moderated online community can pave the way to success. But any survey template or discussion guide needs to be designed to ensure that the overall package, as well as individual features or attributes, are each assessed and fed back on.

This is something that needs to happen in the early stages of decision-making, too. It cannot be left too late as concept testing aims to help you iterate your ideas and tweak them ahead of launch so that they are primed for success.

2. Concept Testing Prevents Bad Decision-Making

Testing concepts in detail before launch may seem like it delays your go-to-market strategy, but it saves significant time and financial losses in the long run. Failed products or services are costly, but concept testing helps you avoid bad ideas and uncover those with untapped potential.

Concept testing helps you find the strongest option to take forward or improve underperforming concepts, ensuring your plans have a solid chance of success. In this way, concept testing can help you avoid an embarrassing failure and take your product development processes from good to great, thanks to that all-important feedback from those who matter – your customers.

3. Concept Testing Identifies Key Elements

Even if you gauge that your product ideas will fly, there are additional considerations, such as positioning, packaging, branding, and pricing. Concept testing optimizes your innovation, reducing the risk of project failure and limiting excessive costs.

Concept testing is crucial for product developers to determine the innovation’s chance of success. It can shed light on blind spots, inefficiencies, misinterpretations, or problems that can lead to failure. Using concept testing methods like surveys as well as qualitative research via a focus group, in-depth interview, or online community can all help to tease out your target audience’s wants or needs.

4. Concept Testing Fixes Problems Early

The sooner concept testing is undertaken, the more flexibility you have to optimize your initial idea. Concept testing helps you understand what elements don’t work, allowing you to refine ideas swiftly based on consumer feedback.

Through concept testing, you can understand what elements don’t fly with customers so you can ditch underperforming elements to save costs or iteratively improve concepts so that they better meet consumer needs. With an online community, for instance, it’s possible to develop concepts based on consumer feedback and then upload them for further feedback, in this way allowing you to refine ideas swiftly.

5. Concept Testing Ensures Market Fit

Concept testing puts the consumer voice at the heart of product development, ensuring new products resonate with customers and increase business performance. It helps you identify pain points or delights relating to new ideas, establish how your product fits into the lives of your target audience, and determine which concepts they would be willing to pay for.

Good concept testing means getting under the skin of your customer and letting their feelings and needs guide you toward the solutions with the most potential. By putting consumers central to product development, you can develop products and services that outperform the competition.

Conclusion

Concept testing is a crucial step in the product development process, providing valuable insights and feedback from the target audience. It helps businesses refine their concepts, build better products, and increase their chances of market success. By partnering with skilled market researchers, you can gain the insights needed to focus efforts in product development and outperform the competition.

Concept testing is a critical market research method that allows businesses to gather feedback and validate their ideas before investing significant resources into product development. It involves presenting potential product concepts or ideas to a target audience and collecting their feedback to assess market potential and make informed decisions.

By conducting concept testing, businesses can identify and address potential issues or shortcomings in their product concepts early on. This process helps refine and optimize the product’s features, design, and overall value proposition. It enables brands to gather valuable insights into consumer preferences, needs, and expectations, allowing them to align their product development efforts with market demand.

The feedback gathered during concept testing provides actionable data for designers and product teams to improve their concepts iteratively. By incorporating user insights, businesses can make informed decisions about product features, functionality, usability, and overall user experience. This iterative approach ensures that the final product aligns with user needs, expectations, and preferences, increasing the likelihood of market success.

Moreover, concept testing helps in minimizing the risks associated with product development. By validating concepts early on, businesses can avoid costly mistakes and reduce the probability of launching a product that fails to resonate with the target market. It allows companies to make data-driven decisions, optimize resources, and ultimately build better products that are more likely to succeed in the marketplace.

Concept testing plays a pivotal role in the product development process by providing valuable insights and feedback from the target audience. By leveraging this feedback, businesses can refine their concepts, build better products, and increase their chances of delivering solutions that meet customer needs and expectations. This iterative and user-centered approach enhances the overall product quality and increases the likelihood of market acceptance and success.

Product development need never be a risk. If you’d like our support with a concept testing project, please get in touch or request a proposal.

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