Concept testing helps you figure out how helpful, affordable, and unique your idea is to your potential customers. It helps you determine the usability and desirability of your product to your target audience.
There are 3 major platforms to help you test concepts, full-service companies, online survey platforms, and automated concept testing platforms. However, we’ll be focusing on automated testing platforms in this article.
What Are Concept Testing Platforms For?
When testing a concept, you’re investigating its relevance, advantages, differentiations, and pricing. Using this research method helps you identify the most profitable ideas and rank them high when thinking of a feature or product release.
Concept testing gives you insight into what to modify about an idea that will make it easier for customers to use, and affordable for them. It’s what helps you find out why customers would be willing to pay for a product or feature even if it’s a bit above what they are used to; it helps you see the value customers see when they desire a product.
When testing a concept it’s presenting an idea in a way that it’s easy for customers to understand its objectives, how they can use it, and if it suits your company’s values.
Why Is It Relevant to Use Concept Testing Platforms?
Concept testing is a very important market research technique that helps you know if the idea you want to launch is a great fit for the target market you’re developing it for. It also employs the insights gathered from the potential customer to modify the concept into a product the target audience desires.
But concept testing requires extensive research, and reliable results to make valid decisions. It’s not a complex research method but it requires high accuracy to get valid conclusions that will help develop the concept into a product the target audience wants and are willing to buy.
As a result, most organizations use research agencies for concept testing. But the drawback of hiring research agencies is that getting the results could take up to a month or two.
In a fiercely competitive market, waiting for a month or two to launch a product that could put you ahead of your competition is a bit risky especially when the competitors are as innovative as you are. Launching first and giving your customers the best experience puts you ahead of your competitor; it’s hard for them to sway your customers away when you’re already ahead of the curve, providing them with excellent products, and great pricing when they need it.
To avoid this long wait time for concept testing with research companies, smaller market research companies have automated the process, making it faster and simpler for companies to test their ideas and have the results almost immediately.
Types of Concept Testing Suppliers
Most market research firms that do concept testing have specific services and tools they use based on what their customers (you) need to test. Here are the 3 main groups:
Full-Service Research Agencies
This type of company offers full research services. They have pre-designed methods of testing methods and have full-fledged market research companies.
Full-service research agencies also have access to a large database of respondents, and researchers, which increases the chances of getting very accurate results with them. But the downside of opting for this type of concept testing supplier is that it takes a while to get results.
Many companies are conducting research with them and they are offering so many services, so rather than just test your concept as a single test, most full-service research companies will combine the test with others. This might cause your results to delay.
Using full-service research companies is also a bit expensive, majorly because they use actual researchers, not just software to conduct tests. So, you’ll be paying for the expertise used in conducting your concept tests.
Major research agencies such as Ipsos, kantar, Metrix, and others are good examples of full-service research companies.
Online Survey Platforms
Using online survey platforms allows you to source reliable and valid insights for your concept fast and at an affordable price. They help you gather data from your target audience much faster than full-service research platforms.
They provide you with customizable survey templates that make it easy for you to ask the respondents what they want from your product. You could also build your survey from scratch using your already-designed questionnaire.
The survey templates provided by these platforms have already been tested to be sure your response will find them attractive and be eager to answer your questions. Aside from helping you ask what your audience needs, only survey platforms also provide you with your research analytics in a simple, and clear manner that you can leverage to adjust your concept to what your customers desire.
A good example of an online survey platform is Formplus. You can build your survey using customizable templates, the form builder is also very user-intuitive which would make it pretty easy for you to design your questionnaire by yourself.
After designing your survey, you can import your contacts using Formplus integrations, distribute it to them and track their submissions. You can also embed the survey on your website if you’d like people other than your existing customers to participate in the study.
Automated Concept Testing Platforms
Automated concept testing platforms are quite similar to online survey platforms except they have their database of participants and distribute the questionnaire to them automatically.
You can either design your questionnaire or opt for theirs. They design the concept testing questionnaire based on the goal you want to achieve with the research, the target audience, and your brand image.
If you opt for designing your concept testing templates, unline online survey platforms where you can customize everything from start to end, you can only vary a few things with automated concept testing platforms.
Having an established structure for concept test means your results have a high likelihood of being valid because they will be designed according to existing questionnaire standards of concept tests.
The major benefit of using this method is that it allows you to access a large pool of participants that fit your customer persona. Automated testing platforms are also not as expensive and way faster than full-service research platforms.
The standard benchmark automated concept testing platforms use may restrict you from gaining new insights into your ideas other than what’s standard. They are also a bit more expensive than online survey platforms.
The Top Automated Concept Testing Platforms
Cambri lets you both design concepts and tests them. It streamlines the product development process by providing you with the KPIs you need to monitor to ensure your product is desirable for your customers.
You can use Cambri to test your ideas and product’s acceptability with product designs, pricing, respondents’ emotional reactions, and more.
With Methodify, you can conduct several types of market research including concept tests, A/B tests for ads, idea ranking, and more. Unlike most automated concept testing platforms, Methodify allows you to design your research project, and give your response in less than 24 hours.
You can also generate reports for your research with Methodify, analyze your data and filter the data to focus on the information you’re more interested in.
You can choose the method for the concept test, select your target audience, then launch. Methodify also allows you to embed videos, collect video responses, and use a chatbot to conduct virtual interviews.
Methodify also allows you to visualize data in real-time, predict emotional responses, and analyze open-ended responses.
The most unique service Toluna for concept testing is its monadic tests; you can test up to 12 ideas with one research. You can also filter your respondents to fit your target audience and generate real-time reports.
Toluna also has specific features to optimize your concept tests such as video responses, time exposures for respondents to answer questions, and pricing acceptance.
SightX is an automated research platform that allows you to design projects, measure customer engagement, generate research reports, and research analytics. It also allows you to customize your market research questions.
Like Toluna, SightX also allows you to conduct comparative tests between multiple ideas and accept multimedia responses.
Unlike most automated concept testing platforms, that provide concept tests as part of their services, Upsiide has a specific platform for concept testing. It allows you to measure respondents’ acceptance of your idea by allowing them to swipe for products they like.
With Upsiide, if respondents like an idea, they swipe right, if they don’t, they swipe left. It also uses trade-off technology to help you measure how favorably your idea will compete in the market or which of your multiple concepts is better.
The trade-off technology requires the respondents to choose between two concepts; if they could only have one of them, which will they pick? If they pick your idea when comparing it to multiple similar products, your concept will most likely compete favorably in the market.
Upsiide also uses quadrant charts and network maps to help you visualize data easily.
Kantar doesn’t just allow you to test concepts, it also helps you construct a roadmap optimizing the concept.
When testing multiple concepts, Kantar automatically analyzes the concepts and lets you know the idea with a higher chance of succeeding and how you can improve the other concepts to have a better shot at succeeding.
Some of the KPIs Kantar uses to assess concepts are purchase intent, topline growth metrics, and trial.
Fastuna is one of the simplest concept testing platforms to navigate. It has pre-designed automated solutions to test and assess concepts.
You can choose your target audience, and the media, then launch the concept tests. Fastuna auto-generates and tailors the questionnaire based on the concepts you’re testing.
Fastuna also helps you compare the results of your concept test with the industry standard, to help you understand your concept’s acceptability in the market. It also uses comparative testing techniques for concept testing; respondents can compare up to 10 different concepts to choose the one they want based on its pricing, features, and user-intuitiveness.
Zappi is an automated concept testing platform that allows product developers to understand how viable their product is in the market. The company was developed jointly with global brands and has specific tools for market research.
Zappi uses various metrics to measure the strength of your concept. Some of the metrics are trial, are people willing to try your product, if they aren’t, it’s probably because they don’t see value in it; most people opt for free trials.
They also test for believability, do your target believe you can the concept the way it’s presented to them? Zappi also helps you check how much people love or dislike your product when some features and services are altered.
The database used by Zappi depends on your conduct and industry. They also measure the respondents’ emotional behaviors toward your concept with proprietary scores.
Ipsos is a full-service research company, but it has a concept testing tool, Innotest DIY tool that allows you to conduct automated concept tests on the platform. Its comparative tests are a bit different, rather than giving respondents different ideas to compare, the participants name the competitor.
Conclusion
Concept testing helps you to present your idea to your target audience and gain insight into what they dislike about the idea. This helps you add or remove features that your target audience doesn’t find helpful or useful when developing your product.
The fastest method of reliably testing your concepts and getting accurate results on a large scale is automated concept testing platforms. They help you gauge your target audience’s reaction to the concept you’re testing, its pricing, and how you can use their feedback to develop a product they want.