Whether you’re planning to launch a new product or develop an existing one, product testing is an essential step in the market research process.
Product testing will help your business gain valuable insight into your customers attitudes and perceptions towards your products and services and help you determine how to meet their needs and desires.
Here we share our eight steps to planning successful product testing:
1- Preparation
Prepare as much as possible in advance. Provide the venue, supervisors and interviewing teams with everything they need for the tests to run smoothly, this will reduce any glitches, last minute panics or delays that could slow the tests down.
2- Know your venues
Although product testing can be carried out at your actual business location, we recommend choosing a viewing facility or hotel. Choosing a conveniently located venue, with good transport links and car parking is a must. When selecting your venue, it’s important to know what is included for example; accessibility, Wi-Fi access and recording facilities. Viewing facilities are fully geared up for research projects, meaning they are best placed to manage your product testing requirements.
3- Contingency
It may seem obvious, but make sure you have enough of your product and ensure you have reserves in place. When choosing your venue, it’s a bonus if there is a supermarket close by, in case you need to nip out and grab any last-minute supplies.
4- Consistency
It’s common to run multiple locations for product testing to allow a variety of responses from a mix of participants. The key to collecting large amounts of data is to ensure all tests are conducted in a consistent way, and to ensure the results are fair. We would recommend using one fieldwork company for all of your product tests, this way you can ensure all tests are conducted in exactly the same way and managed by the same team.
5- Rotations
Don’t be put off by a complex looking rotation – take time to understand the products involved and the way in which they need to be tested.
6- The team
Working with a team you can trust, in particular the supervisor, can significantly reduce the stress of planning and running product tests. Choose someone you have past experience of working with. A good supervisor will be the glue that holds your product tests together and will ensure that the interviewing team are fully briefed, trained and ‘on board’ with the project in hand.
7 – Recruitment
Some product tests will require the participants to be pre-recruited, if this is the case, recruitment is key – ensure all quotas are met, you have back-ups in case of any last-minute drop outs, offer a decent incentive to engage the participants, and make sure you are transparent with them so participants are fully aware of what’s involved, what they will be expected to do and what they will be testing.
8 – Most importantly…
Above everything remain cool, calm and collected!