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For new product innovation
With any new product innovation, the stakes are high. New products are a key source of incremental revenue and profit for manufacturers, and retailers are constantly besieged by new products trying to reach their shelves. An enormous number of new products are de-listed within three years of launch, at significant cost to their manufacturers, and the constant listing and de-listing represents a significant cost for retailers.
With only 25% of new products surviving, how can you improve your new products’ chances of success?
Successful product innovation requires good ideas - a concept or message that is motivating to the consumer and relevant to their needs – and smart investment decisions.
With new ideas, the focus can be wide initially, but this should narrow down quickly. While there are many factors to be considered, companies that don’t involve the consumer in this ‘weeding out’ process take known risks.
Put your product concepts to the consumer test
Product concepts can work on a number of ways to connect with the consumer, but ACNielsen experience has found that successful product concepts will:
- Drive an empathetic response, making the consumer feel connected personally.
- Persuade them to take some action, or at least be willing to investigate the concept in more depth.
- Have some impact, and at least some degree of uniqueness.
- Clearly communicate the new concept.
These four dimensions - Empathy, Persuasion, Impact and Communications – are collectively what ACNielsen refers to as EPIC measures, the key KPIs used to evaluate Communications in the “@work” family of services offered by ACNielsen.
concepts@work has been designed specifically to simultaneously evaluate many concepts in a wide variety of forms in terms of their EPIC performance scores.
By linking consumer motivations with their decision-making, concepts@work can help define a better set of concepts for further exploration, as well as providing vital clues on what needs to be refined to create a winning concept.
ACNielsen | concepts@work
Many other concept testing systems use simple performance measures that tend to select a very similar set of “top concepts”. concepts@work will allow you to look at the performance of concepts on a multidimensional basis, assessing, for instance, whether a concept that seems to score badly is in fact only missing out on one dimension (e.g. it achieves Empathy, but is does not have enough Impact in its current form).
Having dynamic action standards at concept development stage is critical, because often the main aim is to identify a set of themes that the creative agency can develop into a variety of alternatives. concepts@work analysis identifies the potential of idea, not simply in terms of winners and losers, but also by separating out ones with more "niche" appeal and ones that may have potential despite certain flaws.
Get your consumers to assess your concepts
concepts@work is built around an understanding that people have difficulty expressing their feelings when faced with a multitude of similar concepts, often illustrated with minimal artwork and/or short positioning statements. This leads in many cases to poor discrimination between concepts. concepts@work uses CAPI or online questioning to allow respondents to directly appraise the concept with the help of visual scaling systems.
The result is an ability to more finely distinguish emotional and communications impact for even very similar concepts or ideas.
Overcoming differences in the way consumers ‘rate’ in questionnaires
Concepts@work introduces a segmentation based on new learning that suggests that some people are more "anchored" in their choice processes, and more open to concepts that resonate with their current needs and behaviours. Other people tend to be easier to influence and have mental choice patterns that are more volatile. ACNielsen refers to the latter group as “High Deltas” and the former as “High Omegas” (similar distinctions are also key in ACNielsen’s new Qualitative service, ACNielsen | DeltaQual).
Building a picture of how concepts work for each type of respondent is key to understanding whether they are likely to have longer or shorter-term appeal and if the appeal varies with the “mind-set” of the consumer.
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