Can you guess how many products fail every year?
Well, whatever your guess may have been, you’re set to be proven wrong.
A mammoth 95% of new products fail every year. Concept testing is what makes sure your product falls into the remaining 5%. Concept testing allows you to understand whether your product is resonating with the audience before launching it.
It allows you to understand what your customers feel about every aspect of your product. You can make improvisations or modifications depending on that feedback which increases your chances of success.
And the great news — it’s not limited to just products. You can make use of concept testing for:
- New website
- New features
- Getting your pricing right
- Identifying new customer segments
Here’s how you can conduct concept testing:
1. Decide on your objectives:
What are you trying to achieve with concept testing? It could be knowing if the new features are useful for your customers or figuring out how likely it is that a new target market will purchase your product.
2. Select a concept testing method:
There are many types of testing methods you can choose from:
- Comparison testing- This allows you to test your audience on multiple concepts where they can rank or rate each concept
- Monadic testing- Instead of showing every customer group multiple concepts, you divide your audience and have each group evaluate a single concept. This allows you to go more in-depth and understand why customers made specific choices.
- Sequential monadic testing: The above two methods are combined here. You divide the audience into groups as monadic testing but you show them all your concepts. This can give you detailed answers but it could be lengthy for many people.
- Protomonadic testing: A combination of all the methods; it tends to follow the sequential monadic testing approach followed by comparison testing where the audience chooses their favorite concept.
3. Select the right tools:
There’s a lot involved in concept testing. From deciding on the audience, framing the survey questions and multiple concepts, deploying the tests, to assimilating all the feedback and evaluating it, there are a ton of things to do. Concept testing tools do most of this work for you so you can focus on important parts. Here are some tools you can try out: Qualtrics, Zappi, Kantar, and Toluna.
4. Finalize your audience:
Depending on your objectives, choose the ideal audience for your concept testing. If you get this step wrong, your product managers and designers will have the wrong customers in mind during product designing and development. For example, if you’re launching a new feature that helps in designing posters, reaching out to marketing agencies would be a better choice than say, reaching out to tech firms. But ensure that you don’t narrow your audience too much. It should not just consist of your target market now but also your potential market in the future.
Now that you know how to conduct concept testing, just keep in mind these important factors - make it easy for your audience to get started again if they face any issues in the middle, and keep your surveys simple.
There you go! You’re all set to create a successful product now. Happy Concept Testing!
