From new product variants and service offerings, to creative territories, concept testing is vital to mitigate risk, identify winning ideas, and ensure data-driven decision-making when bringing something new to market.
In this article, we’re going to be taking a closer look at concept testing, including some real-world concept testing examples to help inspire your pre-launch testing strategies.
Let’s dive in!
Concept testing refers to the process of evaluating and validating ideas from early-stage to later-stage to determine how they are likely to perform in-market once launched. Through concept testing, companies can gain a clearer understanding of how a target audience is likely to respond to new products, services, campaigns, or other ideas while gathering valuable feedback to refine and improve the ideas under testing.
Concept testing optimizes the development process by ensuring that resources are directed toward ideas with the greatest potential, greatly improving the chances that a new launch will succeed.
Concept testing can be applied to every individual step of the development process, helping to identify not only the most viable products or services, but the most resonant logo ideas, messaging, naming ideas, and more.
Some concept testing examples include:
Test the viability of multiple concepts to narrow the field
Test new product packaging
Test claims or the prominence of claims on packaging
Understand consumer reactions to new product forms or flavors
Evaluate product repositionings or line extensions relative to your competition
Gauge consumer reaction to promotions
Identify product attribute importance, including drivers and barriers
Evaluate ads and messages
Concept testing is vital for providing companies with the data they need to make informed strategic decisions throughout the development of something new, mitigating risk and maximizing the chances of in-market success.
For the past decade, CRG Predictive Intelligence has validated its innovation success by comparing our concept testing results against Circana’s in-market retail sales data. The result of this research-on-research has yielded a 90% prediction accuracy on product concepts year after year.
Additionally, we have validated our method against more traditional monadic concept testing approaches and MaxDiff techniques.
CRG’s research initiatives have revealed several reasons to consider prediction markets for your next breakthrough innovation need:
Prediction markets have been shown to identify disruptive or breakthrough concept potential better than traditional survey testing
The further out from an event, the more accurate prediction markets become versus “claimed” self-reported future consumer behavior
Truly disruptive concept probabilities will diverge, while concept diagnostics for less disruptive, or closer-in ideas, will be highly correlated
Prediction markets deliver proven accuracy when key measures are framed in a targeted or Job-to-be-done specific context
Extensive normative database