5 Minutes 
Concept tests are an invaluable tool for your company, especially as you gear up to launch a new product or service. By engaging with your target audience during the development phase, concept testing enables you to harness valuable insights and shape your ideas based on direct customer feedback. This elevates your chances of delivering products, messaging, and advertisements that truly meet your customers’ needs and expectations.
Imagine the power of gaining real-time, authentic feedback from your target audience before you invest significant resources into product development. By conducting concept tests, you can leverage the collective wisdom and preferences of your customers, ensuring your final offering resonates with them on a deeper level.
The key to successful concept tests is careful planning. As you figure out how to present your concept to an audience, here are some helpful tips. Some do’s and don’ts of concept testing are:
Do’s of Concept Testing
1. Define Your Objective: Set clear goals about what you want to discover. What information is most important? Are you looking for a greater understanding of what your customers want? Are you interested in the market appeal of your company’s new offering? Or would you like to find ways to your product or service?
2. Select a Representative Sample Audience: When concept testing, participants should reflect your target market. The right representation will make the results of your research more significant.
3. Design a Comprehensive Brief: Your concept should be clearly defined, with details that are easy to grasp. If your testing audience doesn’t understand your product or ad idea, their responses might be unclear.
4. Combine Research Techniques: For the most thorough results, use both quantitative methods, like surveys, and qualitative methods, such as focus groups. Quantitative methods result in clearly defined statistics and numerical data, such as ratings on a scale of 1 to 5. Qualitative methods provide more nuanced and detailed responses for greater insight into customer opinion. Using both methods will give you a deeper understanding of your audience’s perspective.
5. Plan for Multiple Rounds: Test iteratively to improve your research as you go. Repeated tests for a developing concept also help you track your progress and customer response to an evolving idea.
6. Keep Your Questions Neutral: Leading and loaded questions skew the results of market research. Review your concept testing questions and remove biased statements and language. For example, using the word “mankind” can be considered a gendered bias. Your question could be written to include the word “humanity” rather than “mankind.” In addition, remove any leading statements that might appear before a question.
7. Allow for Open Feedback: When utilizing a survey for your concept testing, it should include open-ended questions. When customers can answer in their own words, you might get unexpected yet helpful responses.
8. Consider Current Events: During market research, stay aware of what’s happening locally, nationally and globally. External influences, ranging from international conflicts to market shifts, can affect perception of your idea.
9. Act on Insights: Concept testing provides data to help you make better decisions during development cycles. Use the information you collect to shape and refine your initial ideas. Let customers tell you what will work best for them.
10. Protect Your Intellectual Property: Ask respondents not to talk about what they learn while taking part in concept testing. If your product or service is especially innovative or sensitive, make non-disclosure agreements a requirement for participation.
The Don’ts of Concept Testing
1. Don’t Rush the Process: A concept test takes time. While pausing development to collect responses and compile data can be frustrating, the feedback will be worth the wait. Early-stage market research lets you explore customer experience and adjust to meet the needs of your target audience.
2. Don’t Ignore Negative Feedback: When you get negative feedback, it can be easy to dismiss. However, criticism can be particularly helpful as you refine your concept. Take another look at what respondents didn’t like and think about changes that could be made.
3. Don’t Overwhelm Your Audience: When testing multiple ideas, use a research approach designed to make this simple for respondents but useful for you. For example, the MaxDiff method, available through Methodify, allows your audience to easily rank many ideas in “best-worst” pairs while reducing respondent fatigue and potential confusion.
4. Don’t Get Complicated: Keep customer experience in mind as you formulate your concept tests. Every aspect should be accessible and as easy to understand as possible. Describe your idea using everyday language and not industry jargon. Ask questions in a conversational way.
5. Don’t Assume: If a participant’s answer seems uncertain, ask for clarification. They might have more to add or may not have understood the question. Qualitative methods, such as focus groups and in-depth interviews (IDIs), allow you to go back to respondents and gather additional details. Additionally, using a digital qualitative platform such as QualBoard allows you to interact with respondents via multiple event types ranging from bulletin board discussions to repetitive diaries, as well as real-time video chats, quick polls, and live crowd surveys
Not only does concept testing provide you with a solid foundation of customer insights, but it also acts as your shield against potential pitfalls. By identifying and rectifying any shortcomings in your product, messaging, or ads early on, you can avoid costly mistakes and wasted efforts in the long run. This proactive approach empowers you to fine-tune your offerings, increase customer satisfaction, and gain a competitive edge.
