To market, to market: Here my product comes

Q: What do I need to know before I take a product to market? 

A: Determining whether a new product idea is the right one to take to market can be an expensive and lengthy undertaking. To derive the greatest value from your firm’s idea-testing processes, consider these best practices:

• Judge when to test concept vs product
Testing too early or too late in the development cycle can result in wildly misleading results. And so it’s vital for firms to determine at what point or points in the innovation process customers can have meaningful experiences with a product idea. But early concept testing doesn’t always yield useful results — it depends on the product type. Take Crystal Pepsi. All the concept testing in the early 1990s suggested the proposed colourless drink, positioned to occupy space between cola and lemon-lime soda, would be a hit.  And so Pepsi moved ahead with bringing the product to market. And it bombed. Why? Consumers as a whole didn’t have a positive experience with the product, which didn’t have a distinctive flavour of its own. The company wasted millions developing and marketing what should have never escaped R&D.

• Test early and often
Once you start prototyping, test early and often and don’t hesitate to demonstrate unfinished models. In 1998, IDEO worked with Kodak on the interface architecture for one of the company’s first consumer digital cameras, the DC210. In search of feedback on a product category that was still a very new concept for many consumers, IDEO built a prototype three times larger than the hand-held device’s actual size. The larger model allowed consumers to more easily appreciate its features and to really put the various camera buttons and their functions through their paces.

• Listen for the unexpected
The German consumer goods firm Beiersdorf had an idea for a body lotion featuring light-reflecting pigment that would make skin imperfections less noticeable. “When we first put the idea out there, we didn’t talk about moisturising,” says Jim Dunne, the marketing research manager.  But as the firm listened to feedback during concept testing, moisturising was important. So developers refocused marketing efforts to promote the product’s moisturising properties. When Nivea Body Silky Shimmer Lotion hit the stores in 2002, Dunne says, “it was one of our big successes. It was an idea that people had been looking out for.”

• Maintain a safe emotional distance
“Some people become so enthusiastic and wedded to their own idea that they become deaf to feedback that it might be bad. Example? Jiminy Cricket Wishing Stars breakfast cereal created by Post Cereals in 1982 and championed by a company executive against all the odds. The cereal was based around the character Jiminy Cricket, best known for his song “When You Wish Upon a Star” in the 1940 animated film Pinocchio. Children in the early 1980s had no idea who Jiminy Cricket was.

• Seek naive users
When testing out prototypes,  involve people who are totally unfamiliar with that product. “Nonexperts who’ve never used something are better at figuring out how to use it and estimating the time it takes to use it,” one expert says.

• If all else fails, go with your gut
In the end, should your testing yield contradictory or ambiguous results, trust in what you think is right based on all the information.