Disruptive CMO Marketing

Marketing concept testing for new product development

Concept testing allows you to take some of the risk out of new product development by assessing consumer reactions to a fundamental idea or design at its early stage. The objective is to identify which new ideas have the most potential and are worthy of further development.

Here is a video on the well known example of how New Coke failed with consumers:

 

It is clear from this video that the full brand experience is an important part of concept testing.

One of the objectives of concept testing is to forecast the likely sales take-off in year one, to estimate the repeat purchasing levels and to clarify the profile of potential users.

Concept testing and product testing are particularly suited to the online medium because a wide variety of visual and audio stimuli can be displayed and evaluated. By using images and sound files to provide a ‘near-real-world’ test environment, online testing provides you with actionable information about how your concept is perceived by your target audience, and how it compares with others on the market. Even at the pre-concept level, online testing enables large numbers of potential concept ideas to be prioritised and reduced to a manageable number that can be taken to the next step in development and research.

Benefits of concept testing online    
* Cost effectiveness - No need for expensive, physical prototype construction or fieldwork costs.    
* Reduced development cycle - Allows you to bring your product to market sooner.    
* Interactivity - Respondents can interact with high quality images or logos if required.    
* Speed of turnaround - Questionnaire can be distributed and results collected in real-time.    
* Richness of responses - Results show that people tend to be more honest and responses are ‘richer’ in content when completed online.    
* Reduced bias - There is no interviewer bias online.    
* Respondent convenience - Respondents can complete the questionnaire when and where it suits them. They can suspend the interview and come back to it later. This has a positive impact on response rates.    
* Geographical reach - For nation-wide and multi-country research, respondents can be located anywhere.    
* Automated questionnaire delivery - Exact skip and flow control and accurate rotations when multiple concepts are being shown.    
* Time and click-based interaction data - Respondent’s behaviour and level of interaction with each of the concepts can be monitored.    
* Online reporting - real-time results can be provided via our online Snapshot software, allowing percentages and simple cross-tabs to be produced whilst the study is ‘in field’.    
* Verbatim responses - Responses to open-ended questions can be provided directly to the client.    
* Evaluation control - Respondents view concepts from a consistent position and in the required order.    
* Flexibility - Variations on a concept can be tested without incurring significant costs.

For information on how to write a proper Product Concept click here

Maximize consumer insights with your sales department

With the right training sales people should become a natural source for first hand consumer insights. They need to look at three elements:
- insights generated from consumer contact
- insights generated from shoppers
- generating insights based on sales or customer analysis

Insights generated from consumer contacts
This is of course the biggest and easiest to formalize the generated insights. First, a process needs to be in place where interesting feedback from both outlet staff and shopping consumers, get captured into the sales report. Balance need to be kept to avoid too much paper filling. You could set weekly objectives like ask these questions to 10 people in your category aile and provide a summary of the feedback by end of week. This can easily be integrated into the handheld programs.

Generating insights based on sales or customer analysis
There are several information points available to the sales department: discussions with retailers, retailers' data, regional analysis and coporate generated insights. The trick is to provide them the relevant cut of the data or insights. Not the research report. In addition, the data needs to be cut by preference for their region. National averages may be interesting to know, but becomes much more powerful when compared to their local performance.
The national account teams or regional sales teams can also provide better insights into how a certain program worked in different channels so the insights are channel specific. They link consumer insights to channel specific shopping insights to the sales consumer drivers.

It is important to have a structured approach. This means fixed meetings, consumer insights need to be part of sales planning data as well as objective setting to the right sales consumer drivers. Key is that they feel responsible for influencing consumers and that they don't think this is for the marketing teams.

Focus groups remain very limited and needs alternatives

Focus group research are not the same as true consumer contact or consumer observation. What will talking for 2 hours about toothpaste in a room learn you? Better would be to observe the people using toothpaste in their own bathroom and then ask a few pointed questions.

If you ask consumers a question they feel they need to answer and play an expert role. Sure I use this product, so I am an expert but often they are not. Yes, we have all upgraded the recruitement criteria with well-spoken, well-read individuals so that at least we get articulate individuals but it still is not the same as consumer contact techniques like at home or in-the-store observation.

Sometimes focus groups are being used for trend spotting but that seems like using the wrong tool for that. Yes, you can put taxi drivers in a room to get a street-level perspective on consumer trends but I think the learnings might be far from applicable and too generic.