Consumers Control the Success of Your New Product Concepts

Alastair Gordon
Managing Director, R&D and Brand Health Management
ACNielsen Australia

At the heart of any successful product repositioning or new product launch, is a new idea — a concept or message that is motivating to the consumer and relevant to their needs. Concepts can work on a number of ways to connect with the consumer, but ACNielsen experience suggests that successful product concepts will:

1. Drive an empathetic response, making the consumer feel connected personally
2. Persuade them to take some action, or at least be willing to investigate the concept in more depth
3. Have some impact and have at least some degree of uniqueness
4. Clearly articulate at least one relevant and intended product advantage.

These dimensions, Empathy, Persuasion, Impact and Communications are collectively what we refer to as EPIC measures and are the key KPIs used to evaluate Communications in the “@work” family of services offered by CNielsen. The latest member of that family, concepts@work, has been designed specifically to simultaneously evaluate many concepts in a wide variety of forms in terms of their EPIC performance scores.

This approach is important, because it allows clients to look at the performance of concepts on a multidimensional basis, assessing, for instance, whether a concept that seems to score badly is in fact only missing out on one dimension (eg, it achieves empathy, but is does not have enough ‘impact’ in its current form). Many other concept testing systems utilise simple performance measures that tend to select a very similar set of “top concepts”. Having dynamic action standards at concept development stage is critical, because often the main aim is to identify a set of themes that the creative agency can develop into a variety of alternatives. Concepts@work analysis identifies the potential of idea, not simply in terms of winners and losers, but also by separating out ones with more “niche” appeal and ones that may have potential despite certain flaws.

As well as producing more useful KPIs, concepts@work is built around an understanding that people have difficulty expressing their feelings when faced with a multitude of similar concepts, often illustrated with minimal artwork and/or short positioning statements. This leads in many cases to poor discrimination between concepts. Concepts@work utilises the capability of CAPI or online questioning to allow respondents to directly interact with the concept by utilising visual scaling systems.

The result is an ability to more finely distinguish emotional and Communications impact for even very similar concepts or ideas.

Another reason that tests of early-stage concepts of products and services often produce confusing results is that consumers react differently to new ideas. Concepts@work introduces a segmentation based on new learning about how people actually make decisions — learning that suggests that some people are more “anchored” in their choice processes, and are more likely to be open to concepts that resonate with their current needs and behaviours.

Other people tend to be easier to influence and have mental choice patterns that are more volatile. We call the latter group “High Deltas” and refer to the former as “High Omegas” (similar distinctions are also key in ACNielsen’s new Qualitative service, ACNielsen | DeltaQual). Building a picture of how the concepts work for each type of respondent is key to understanding whether they are likely to have longer or shorter-term appeal and if the appeal varies with the “mind-set” of the consumer.

By linking analysis to executional objectives, plus consumer motivations and decision-making, concepts@work can help define a better set of concepts for further exploration, and also provide vital clues on what needs to be refined to create a winning concept.