Product Development Market Research
What can Product Development Research do for My Business?
- Ensure that your new product idea fills a key need of the target audience?
- Is there a product variant that could fill the needs of a new target customer and is the concept worth further development?
- What brand(s) would help to bring credibility to this type of product? Does your brand carry the customer perceptions that would sufficiently match the nature of this product?
- How much would the target customer be willing to pay for a product like this?
- For the product that isn't doing as well in the market as you were expecting, could it be that the features/capabilities aren't quite scratching the itch that customer have? Could it be awareness? Could it be the channel that you're using? What other factors could be limiting your sales?
- Do customer's have problems that no one is addressing, but which customers would be willing to pay for a product or service that would solve, or significantly reduce their challenges?
- Are there competitive products that don't quite meet the customer's needs, or that customers simply don't trust the brand to deliver, and that your brand would be a stronger brand to carry the product category?
- Are there unrealized needs that customers have, that some detailed research might be able to identify ethnography and that could become significant products for your company?
- Do you have a product that fills the need of customers, but the complexity, or the description of the product leaves the customer unsure about its actual function?
- Are there products that you have that could be expanded into significant new markets with only some slight changes to the product or the distribution channel?
What is Product Development Market Research?
For many new types of products, one of the first test is to see how they perform for a number of target customers in some form of market research. There are a number of market research methods that can help to understand how strong of a concept the product is, or if it might hold significant interest with some modifications. That's the type of information that product development research can help to uncover.
Product Development Market Research can be either qualitative or quantitative depending on the issues that are most uncertain. Qualitative research can be used to introduce a new category of product and to get reactions to the idea in general, or it can be used to understand if the shape and design (industrial design) are appropriate for the product type and the environment in which it will be used. Quantitative research can be used to understand just how appealing each of the selling features are to the target audience and if the pricing approach makes sense based on substitute products. Quantitative market research can also be used to help understand just how large of a market a product might be attractive to, and what the substitute products are.
How does Product Development Market Research Work?
You could use almost the entire gamut of market research methods to support one aspect or another of product development. The key to deciding which method will typically be determined by two factors: what methods makes it easiest to communicate with the target audience and how complicated is the concept (or do you need to show a prototype or other visual aids). If the concept is going to be easy for most customers to grasp, then online options will probably save a lot of money and give a broader range of geographically distributed customers, which is typically a good thing. However, the more complex the topic is, the more important it is to include the non-verbal signals, which often means some form of face to face method (or maybe even a phone and web combination (WEPI)).
The stage of development of the product concept should also be taken into account: if the product concept is still in a concept phase, the less expensive mediums will probably suffice, and the respondent can tell you if the product concept is something that fills a need or holds significant interest for them. As the product concept develops, it becomes more important to show the details of how the product would actually be used (possibly through flowcharts or other visual aids) Suitable market research methods would include web or phone interviews if the industrial design is considered unimportant.
The key to product development research is to ensure that the target customer gets a good idea of the entire picture of the product concept - benefits, warts and all. They may need to know exactly how the product accomplishes it's objective, what the product concept will do, and in some cases how it will look. If there are questions about a certain facet of the product, and how the target customer might respond to them, then the research method should find a way to ensure that part of product concept is clearly understood by the respondent to ensure that you don't get a misread from the research.
