Best Practices for Agile, Early Stage Concept Evaluation

A 3-Step Process to Quickly Identity and Refine Concepts

Concept testing, while essential to making smart investments within limited resources, often gets paid short shrift because of perceptions that it might slow down the development and innovation process. Companies place a premium on being agile, nimble and streamlined in their innovation process, so the priority is to identify, refine, and launch new ideas quickly.

The reality is, evaluating concepts doesn’t have to be at odds with the goal of being fast and nimble. In fact, the evaluation process can be used to help move your product initiatives along more smoothly and efficiently.

By implementing this agile 3 -step process, you can achieve valuable insights and move briskly to the next steps leading to your launch.  What we’ve outlined below can be achieved in tight timeframe because it is interactive and fluidly connects the dots from customer feedback to concept validation.

1. Lay Out Concepts in a Consistent, Structured Manner

Well-designed concepts that are consistent in style, appearance, and content ensure that you can more readily identify winners and highlight areas that will strengthen performance.

It’s important to maintain these same standards across all concepts:

• Keep the same format across all concepts —whether it’s print, video, or animatics.
• Include visuals or an accompanying prototype if possible
• Decide if the concepts will be branded or unbranded.
• Determine if the concept should be priced or unpriced

2. Execute Real-Time Concept Optimization

This approach provides an agile, in-the-moment approach to concept testing that allows you to arrive at a result in days, rather than weeks. In just one single round of research, you can expect finalized, market-ready concepts.

How it Works:

• Focus group respondents are shown concepts to gauge emotional, intellectual, and visceral reactions, as well as likes, dislikes, degree of interest, and more
• Based on reactions and feedback from the first group, the concepts are refined and prioritized
• The refined concepts are then shown to the next group, and so the process of refinement continues, until the concepts are fully developed
• The final output is refined concepts that have the greatest viability for market acceptance

3. Quickly Validate Winning Concepts Quantitatively

This last step is to move the real-time concepts into a quantitative survey.  The survey can be set up prior to going into the real-time optimization session allowing you to smoothly transition to this next phase.

It’s critical to have this quantitative evaluation so you can achieve a more accurate sense of KPIs such as purchase intent, appeal, perceived value, and uniqueness among your target market.  Likewise, when you have multiple strong concepts you can leverage the benefits of monadic, proto-monadic, or paired-comparison testing to identify the true winner.

Creating a streamlined survey that hits on the key metrics and is prepared in advance of the qual allows you to achieve a quantitative assessment in a matter of days.

Want to learn more about this agile 3-step concept evaluation, including the Radius Real-Time Concept Optimizer^TM? 

Contact us.