Ah, the retailer’s shelf. It’s either a red-carpet runway for a brilliantly conceived new product or the last stop before the dollar store.
Consumer-product companies have a wretched track record when it comes to launching products that result in sustained success. They often struggle to generate incremental volume and justify shelf space. To improve their odds, they’ve embraced qualitative and quantitative testing of product ideas expressed as concepts. So urgent is the need to pick a winner that Fortune 500 companies will spend up to tens of million of dollars annually developing and assessing ideas. The crescendo of all this effort is “the concept test,” where a brand exposes its can’t-miss ideas to a target audience, hoping to tease out which products to launch and what changes need to be made before going to market.
Unfortunately, no matter how advanced testing methodologies become, the old axiom still applies: Garbage In, Garbage Out. In other words, all the money and the most sophisticated testing tools in the world don’t mean a thing if the concept doesn’t have that swing. Said another way, you’ll never know if you have a winner or a loser or know what to fix if your concepts are poorly developed.
Here are some pointers about what makes a new product concept ready for testing.
Testing methodologies and goals: write to the consumer and to the test
Whether you’re using Synovate, Bases, AccuPoll, or a custom study, it helps to keep in mind the elements your test will be measuring as your team is developing the concepts. Most testing methodologies try to estimate each product concept’s level of
• uniqueness–how truly different this product is from others currently available in the marketplace
• believability–how well you have supported the product’s promise to solve a problem or fulfill a wish; whether you’ve made the concept credible by explaining how the product will do what you promise it will do
• purchase intent— the consumer’s intention with regard to buying this product if it were offered for sale as described in the concept.
Typically the topics listed above are addressed through close-ended questions. But adding supplemental open-ended questions can help unearth “why” specific responses were chosen, revealing areas of weakness and opportunities for improvement. Asking respondents why they rated the product concept a six on believability, for instance, could lead to a whole new world of understanding and opportunities.
Concept improvment: summarize, reiterate, and elaborate conversationally
Naturally the star of the show is the product idea itself. And the best way to improve test results (scores) is to improve the concept itself. Fortunately, we know what high-scoring concepts typically include:
• A headline that summarizes the product’s ultimate benefit in consumer terms. For instance, “Make Quick Work of Your Lawn Maintenance and Get More Enjoyment from the Fruits of Your Labor.”
• A subhead that reiterates and elaborates on the ultimate benefit: “Introducing the most versatile garden tool you’ll ever own, the new Garden Edge makes short work of tedious lawn work.”
• Opening sentences of the product’s story that engage the consumer by setting up the problem, the wish, or the desire: “Few things are more rewarding than admiring your beautiful lawn. Yet maintaining your lawn can be time-consuming. Along with mowing, someone has to edge the borders and trim the hedges and cut back overgrown branches and tree limbs. And that someone is YOU!”
• Copy that explains what the product does, with reasons to believe that the product will perform as described: “The new Garden Edge will save you time because now you have one tool instead of three. Without so much as swapping a blade, you can go from hedges to edges to tree limbs, because everything is built into one tool.”
• A clear illustration, maybe two–one of the product itself and another of the environment the product is used in—to reinforce the copy and enhance the conversational feel of the concept.
• A statement providing a suggested retail price along with information as to where the product will be available for purchase, to reinforce its positioning in the market.
In short, “don’t just sell it–tell it.” Explain what the product is, how it works, and why the consumer should trust that it will do what you promise. And never ever oversell. Eliminate all boisterous claims, promotional gimmicks, and uninformative catchphrases. Consumers reviewing concepts need to be reassured about the fundamentals of the product idea, not be made suspicious by hype or self-indulgent rhetoric. You can’t address their fundamental or unspoken needs if you appear the least bit overreaching in the product’s promise.
Most important, use a conversational writing style to make sure that your concepts engage consumers. The concepts shouldn’t sound like an internally circulated marketing brief or a science report developed to satisfy the engineers or the food chemists or the lawyers.
Finally, make sure you avoid the classic new-concept trap. It’s easy to get so focused on layout and style that you forget that someone back at the office has to deliver on the technology that makes the concept so appealing. That’s why after the concept is developed, you should ask the folks in research and development to review it: not for style but for pragmatism. Can the product described really be developed and manufactured?
Once you’ve developed stronger concepts, you should expect better test scores. And when the concept test results come back and the winner is chosen, everyone involved can pat himself on the back and be happy…but not for long. The next key step is translating the successful concept into a comprehensive and actionable product brief that R D can use to develop the final SKU. But we’ll save that process for another article.
Barry Curewitz is managing partner/director of strategy and Alan Sharavsky is partner/creative director for Whole-Brain Brand Expansion (www.wbbe.biz), a Plymouth Meeting, PA-based consultancy specialzing in branding and product development.
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