Products are how you deliver your brand to your customer to build Irrational Loyalty with them. Talisman Insights offers a variety of services to help you develop an innovation pipeline and deliver products that your customers will love to use.
Product Concept Testing
Innovation workshops can lead to so many potential good ideas for development that it’s not clear where to start. With infinite resources, you could pursue them all, but in the real world, you have to prioritize. Product concept testing can help you assess which concepts are most likely to garner interest in with consumers (including any audience expansion opportunities) and how to talk about the new products in ways consumers will resonate with.
General Learning Objectives
- Learn about the motivating elements of a product concept
- Assess the jobs consumer believe the product will do
- Explore how to talk about the concepts in ways consumers will understand instinctively
- Prioritize the development pipeline
How We Do It
- Qualitative research can help refine concepts elements to best communicate what the concept is. Focus groups and online discussion boards are the best vehicles for this research, especially the latter as it gives you the opportunity to let consumers show you how they would find and use your products.
- Quantitative research will help you prioritize the development pipeline by letting you measure consumer reaction to the product ideas with and without your branding attached.
Package Testing/Competitive Shelf Testing
The wrapper in which consumers see your products indelibly communicates the brand to them. A failure to consider consumer reaction to a packaging change can lead to negative impacts at the worst possible place in the purchase cycle: the point of sale. In 2009, Tropicana spent $35M to redesign the packaging and relaunch their flagship brand. It failed spectacularly and forced Pepsico to return to the original carton design. Package testing research helps to both refine design changes and identify red flags to prevent a disaster like the above.
General Learning Objectives
- Understand consumer and customer reaction to potential design elements in the packaging
- Assess potential red flags with any design changes, including implications for how they negative impact the brand’s message/value
How We Do It
- The best practice approach is typically a three-phase process: qualitative – quantitative – qualitative.
- The first qualitative phase uses in-depth interviews, focus groups, or best of all, online discussion boards to assess and understand consumer and customer reactions to new designs and the old design.
- The subsequent round of quantitative can assess variations on the designs of winners in the prior qualitative phase in order to finetune them.
- A final round of qualitative interviews (potentially in mock shopping situations) then assesses in final red flags before launch.
Consumer-focused Value Engineering/Selling Propositions
If you’re a manufacturer, you recognize the term “value engineering,” the process by which you assess materials, processes, and functionality in order to minimize the cost to produce while maximizing the value delivered. Consumer-focused value engineering takes a look at your products and the category to assess where consumers, and your customers in particular, feel they receive value from you and your competitors as well as value they would like to receive.
General Learning Objectives
- Assess the source of perceived value in your products and the category overall
- Learn about the job the product does that creates the value for your customers
- Explore how your products can create additional value or better deliver the value they currently create
How We Do It
- In-depth interviews and online qualitative discussion boards let us dig deep into the jobs your products do and the value customers perceive.
- Creative workshops or internal stakeholder research helps to fill out a development pipeline to generate or refine consumer-focused value.
- Quantitative research organizes the functional benefits of your products and the category to define what are category antes (e.g., wheels on a car), elements where people begin to eliminate options, and where people make decisions about purchase regardless of whether or not they know they use those criteria.
Price Elasticity and Product Optimization
Talisman Insights offers the ability to assess price elasticity, optimize products, assess cannibalization, and model market uptake using discrete choice survey (also called choice-based conjoint). Discrete choice modeling is the gold standard for understanding price elasticity and obtaining feedback on consumer reaction to pricing.
General Learning Objectives
- Assessing the optimal combination of product elements and pricing to garner the largest share of interest possible
- Gauge the optimal combination of product options that maximize share and minimize cannibalization of current offerings
- Understand price elasticity in the category and how
How We Do It
- We believe that an initial round of qualitative research can help clarify options for research as well as allowing us to develop an order of preference for qualitative elements for subsequent programming.
- The primary phase consists of a discrete choice study with deliverables that include a market simulator and a final report.
