5 reasons why concept testing is important

Marketing textbooks are littered with examples of the types of products or services which flopped when they hit the market.

Take Juicero, in which investors pumped a staggering $120 million for a wi-fi connected juice maker that nobody had indicated they wanted or needed. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was scrapped within two years.

Or ESPN’s mobile phone service, which was pitched at the wrong price – some $400 – whilst also offering the target audience a lack of choice around the handset. The service was swiftly shut down, with ESPN instead opting to provide content to Verizon.

And remember New Coke? Launched in 1985, it’s still remembered today as a major marketing misstep. The product was abandoned after only a few weeks, with Cola-Cola reverting back to its old formula.

It’s clear that some of the world’s most innovative companies have failed to accurately foresee the impact of new launches when they hit the target market. Even Google, for instance, arguably launched its wearable Google Glass concept too soon. Its sky-high price did not help, and it failed to connect with consumers.

Fortunately, there is a way to avoid this type of failure. By conducting product concept testing before a product launch, businesses are able to develop their ideas in a safe and controlled space with the target audience ahead of launch.

The concept in question can be many different things. It might be a new set of product ideas that no one has ever seen. It might be a redesign or rebrand.

Testing methods can be online, for instance, via quantitative surveys or via online communities focused on gathering qualitative insight, or face-to-face, in a focus group or series of in-depth interviews.

Whatever the method, conducting concept testing can pinpoint the value – or otherwise – of specific features and benefits and indicate whether a product concept will be a major hit or a more niche offering which may not justify the cost and resources needed to make a reality.

UX designers play a crucial role in concept testing by employing their expertise in user-centered design principles. They can contribute to the concept testing process by creating interactive prototypes that simulate the user experience, allowing participants to engage with and provide feedback on the proposed concepts. Through their deep understanding of user behavior and preferences, UX designers can ensure that the concepts are intuitive, usable, and aligned with the target audience’s needs. They can also facilitate user testing sessions, observe participants’ interactions and gather valuable insights to iterate and refine the concepts.

By collaborating closely with stakeholders and incorporating user feedback, UX designers enhance the effectiveness of concept testing, ultimately leading to the development of more user-friendly and successful products or services.

Concept testing does require an investment in market research, but any costs at this stage will be minimal in comparison to launching a product which goes on to fail.

After all, testing is the process of uncovering what your potential consumers like or dislike about your concept, helping you identify which ideas will fly and guiding their future development to ensure success. What’s more, concept testing can enable marketers to understand what to communicate at launch whilst also helping to identify the customer segments with the most potential.

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

1. Concept testing can help you filter ideas so you know which to develop further

Concept testing can help you move beyond blue-sky thinking and determine which of your ideas will be a hit. Rather than relying on subjective opinion, it gives you data that can bring the whole team on board by providing a consensus about which projects to develop and which to shelve.

In this way, great concept testing unites teams behind the ideas that have real potential. There’s no need to worry about office politics or lengthy and frustrating ‘design by committee’. With concept testing, you can hear directly from the consumer what’s likely to cut it – 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 the use of 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 in such a way that ensures 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 can help you steer clear of bad decision-making.

Testing concepts in detail before launch may sound like it will delay your go-to-market strategy, but in the long run, it can save your organization significant time, prevent financial losses, and protect your relationship with customers. Failed products or services are enormously costly, but fortunately, concept testing exists not only to help you avoid bad ideas but also to uncover those with untapped potential.

Concept testing can help you to find the strongest option to take forward among a number of choices or find ways to improve underperforming concepts. Either way, it’s a great way to ensure, quickly and easily, that whatever you’re planning has 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.

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3. Concept testing can help you understand what elements matter to consumers.

Even if you immediately gauge that your product ideas are likely to fly, there are still many additional things to consider through testing methods – such as your positioning, the kind of packaging or branding that would be considered attractive and – arguably the most important factor in the production of any product or service – the most appropriate price.

In this way, a concept test is a way to optimize your innovation, drastically reduce the risk of project failure and limit 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 enables you to fix problems prior to launch.

The sooner concept testing is undertaken, the more flexibility there is for optimizing your initial idea to develop a product that customers truly want and need.

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. Ultimately, concept testing ensures that you develop products that consumers will buy.

Concept testing puts the consumer voice at the heart of product development, ensuring that new products resonate with customers and dramatically increasing business performance.

The results of a concept test can help you to identify the pain – or the delight – relating to new ideas. Concept testing can enable you to establish how your product would fit into the lives of your target audience, how often they might use it and, crucially, which product concept 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 towards the solutions with the most potential. By putting consumers central to product development, you can develop products and services that outperform the competition.

In order to achieve this, it’s important to partner with skilled market researchers that can design studies that get you the insights you need. From a qualitative perspective, this means professionals that can help people open up, answer fully, and elaborate on their responses to concepts. In an online community, for instance, the researcher must carefully guide and curate the discussion in order to gain in-depth feedback.

Ultimately, concept testing gives you a better idea of consumers’ reactions to your ideas. It clarifies the need your solution is addressing, consumers’ perceptions of the product, how it fares against other similar solutions, and what can be done to maximize adoption and market impact.

So it should come as no surprise to learn that this type of market research can have a huge impact on your business, enabling you to understand where to focus efforts in product development by uncovering the view of the target market.

Concept testing is a crucial step in the product development process 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, nor the creation of successful products be a wild stab in the dark. If you’d like our support with a concept testing project, please get in touch or request a proposal.