Concept testing: How important is it in boosting business?
What is concept testing?
Concept testing is essentially a method of evaluation that includes asking your customers about their view of the new product or innovation you are looking to make in an existing product. It is not necessarily done for a particular product, rather it can be done for almost anything like a service, project or an ad or marketing campaign.
Examples of concept testing
There are many areas in which an organization can run concept testing. Some examples of this are mentioned below.
- It can be done for any ideation of a new product or service or any kind of modification in an existing product or service.
- It can be done for marketing campaigns by targeting audiences of the same characteristics and running different ads or marketing creatives with them to analyze which of the marketing creatives are resulting in the maximum amount of desired output.
- It can also be done for testing a website design by presenting different website designs to different people and accumulating and analyzing the user data from that website and finding which website design is resulting in more user engagement and conversions and choosing the one which fits with your main objective.
- It can be done to fix the price of a particular product or service as you will have a clear understanding of what your customers are willing to pay for what you have to provide and analyzing the same with your cost and benefit you can fix a price which can generate your maximum profit while making sure that your product is getting purchased by the customers.
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Benefits of concept testing
There are multiple reasons why it can be beneficial for an organization. Below mentioned are some of the reasons along with examples that can help you understand the benefits and importance of concept testing for any organization.
- If you think that you have a mind-blowing idea and it will for sure be a success and concept testing seems like an added and unnecessary work then you might be wrong. This is so because you might have a good idea but that might not be the need of your customers at this time frame and so it will surely be a failure. However, if you test your concept before actually launching the product or service in the market then it will be easier for you to understand the relevance of the idea in real-time.
- In the scenario where you have ideation for a new idea and you need your organization to reflect and buy in for that idea. The data collected while testing the concept can act as an empirical analysis and can help you gain more confidence of people in your idea for the new product or service.
- It can also save your firm an ample amount of money as you will know which idea for the product will work and which might take the organization in loss and so you will not go through all the extra efforts and invest in the ideas which are not going to be a success for the organization.
- It also helps in optimizing the resources available within the organization as more focus and efforts can be put into areas that can prove to be successful or needs some changes to it.
Ways to conduct concept testing
There are multiple ways in which an organization can conduct concept testing. The best way to figure out which method is best suited for your business depends on multiple factors like the goal or objective, the size of the market share your business deals with, and many other things.
Don’t worry, analyzing which type is best suited for you will become easy as soon as we get to know and understand different methods of conducting concept testing.
Comparison concept testing
In this type, the respondents are given more than one concept which they need to rate or rank.
Monadic concept testing
In this method, the respondents are divided into different groups and each group gets to see only one concept from all the available concepts. This type results in a more in-depth understanding of each concept. As each group of respondents is presented with one concept, the survey length can be relatively small which can result in a higher completion rate.
Sequential monadic concept testing
This method can be seen as a mixture of the previous two methods, as in this method, the respondents get divided into different groups but rather than having one concept for one group as that in monadic concept testing, each group is presented with all the concepts and are asked the same questions. However, in order to avoid any kind of bias, the sequence in which the concept gets presented to respondents differs.
This type testing is not free from bias and is often subject to interaction or order bias as the survey conducted for this method can be extremely lengthy.
Protomonadic concept testing
In this method, the respondents go through both sequential monadic concept testing, followed by comparison concept testing. This helps in ensuring that the concept selected from the results of comparison concept testing is compatible with the data collected about all the concepts. This method goes like this – first the respondents are presented with multiple concepts and when that is done, they are given the choice of selecting a concept of their choice and giving more insights on the same.
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Designing and conducting a concept testing survey
Now that we understand the importance of testing the concept, we should be very mindful while making and conducting a concept testing survey. Let’s look at a few things we should follow and keep in mind while designing and conducting a this type of survey.
Designing a concept testing survey:
- Set a clear goal or objective for which you would like to conduct the concept testing survey.
- Have a consistent and promising survey design that has questions focused only on the goal for which we’re testing the concept.
- Make sure to include questions surrounding the demography of the respondent as this will help you understand whether or not a particular respondent was a part of your target audience.
- For the purpose of testing the concept, surrounding the imagery aspect of the organization for instance logo, make sure to have images on your survey to help respondents have a better understanding of it.
- Try to have Likert scale questions in your survey as and when possible as these might result in higher completion rates.
Conducting a concept testing survey:
- Based on your product and objective, choose an appropriate method to test the concept.
- Now that you’ve chosen an appropriate method, the next step is to have a suitable survey for conducting concept testing.
- The next step is to share the survey with respondents and administer and analyze the same.
- Once you’ve all your analysis ready based on the data submitted by respondents, the final step is to interpret the results and act upon it.
Design and conduct a concept testing survey within a few minutes
FAQs
What is the purpose of concept testing?
The purpose of concept testing is to give confirmation to a new product or improvement to an existing product that it’s better than the competitors and can generate higher value for users.
What are the different types of concept testing?
There are majorly four types of concept testing, namely, comparison testing, monadic testing, sequential monadic, and proto-monadic testing.
