Key takeaways
- Concept testing research helps identify strong ideas early and reduces the risk of investing in concepts that will not resonate with consumers.
- Frequent and early testing supports more effective decision-making and increases the likelihood of campaign and product success.
- Flexible research tools, including Kantar’s agile survey solutions, enable quick, reliable data collection tailored to specific business needs.
- Partnering with experienced research experts improves data quality, speeds up timelines, and strengthens overall research outcomes.
- AI-powered technologies like Kantar Profiles’ Qubed AI protect against data fraud and ensure insights are based on real, engaged respondents.
The average consumer is inundated with countless new products, services as well as 4,000-10,000 ads every single day. With such saturation, your concepts need to stand apart if you want them to be noticed and embraced. One way to achieve this is through effective concept testing. There’s a reason why thorough concept testing, research, and development are critical for product innovation and brand growth. Without it, your new ideas might never gain traction or meet consumer expectations.
Still, developing and testing new concepts can be challenging even for the most experienced innovators. You never know exactly how your target audience will respond to your ideas or which elements will resonate most. The good news is that you don’t have to rely on guesswork. By leveraging concept testing, you can assess and refine your ideas, ensuring they meet consumer needs and preferences. This not only saves time but also boosts the ROI on your product development efforts.
Understanding concept testing research
Concept testing is the process of evaluating new product ideas or concepts to determine their potential success in the market. This involves presenting the concept to a target audience to gather feedback and insights. By utilising concept testing methods, businesses can make data-driven decisions to refine their ideas. This minimises risk, enhances the effectiveness of the development process, and maximises return on investment (ROI).
Here are some key benefits of utilising concept testing research:
- Improved success rates: Concept testing research helps you identify which ideas are most likely to succeed in the market. By understanding your audience's preferences, you can tailor your concepts to better meet their needs and expectations, increasing the likelihood of a successful launch.
- Enhanced brand growth: Effective concept testing can lead to innovations that resonate well with consumers, thereby strengthening your brand. Positive consumer feedback on new concepts can boost brand loyalty and recognition over time.
- Data-driven decision-making: Concept testing provides valuable data from your target audience. This empowers your development team to make informed decisions that are backed by real consumer insights, ultimately leading to more effective product strategies.
How concept testing drives innovation and reduces risk
Brands need to innovate quickly while still meeting real consumer needs. Concept testing helps you do both. By validating ideas early in the development cycle, you can avoid investing heavily in products or campaigns that are unlikely to succeed. This reduces risk and helps teams focus on concepts with the greatest potential.
Concept testing research also supports more meaningful innovation. It highlights unmet needs and behaviours that might not be visible from internal discussions alone. These insights guide the development of products and campaigns that feel relevant and useful to your audience. For sectors such as consumer goods, technology, retail, and financial services, this is especially important. When concept testing research is used consistently, it encourages a culture of learning, evidence-based decisions, and long-term brand growth.
Let’s explore five ways to improve your concept testing and boost your ROI.
1: Conducting surveys for concept testing research
Not sure what your audience thinks of your new concept? Just ask them with a survey.
Why surveys work
Surveys are a particularly powerful testing tool because they provide both qualitative and quantitative data. With the internet, you can reach millions of people and adapt your surveys for a very specific audience. If you want to find out if your target market likes a new concept, you can send out an online survey to hundreds of people and have answers within days.
Crafting effective survey questions
The phrase “good data in, good info out” applies to your survey questions. You want to ask the right question in the right way to collect meaningful information. Here are a few tips for crafting great questions:
- Less is more. If your survey is 50 questions, respondent engagement will decrease and the dropout rate will increase. Keep it as short as you can while still getting necessary information. On top of that, consider how questions are presented, the size of list options and potential redundancies. The goal of good survey design is easy to complete and understand for all responders, including those on mobile devices.
- Keep it relevant. Try to keep all of the questions as relevant to your concept as possible. You’re only looking for information on this research question, not your company as a whole.
- Have some open-ended questions. Open-ended questions are a great tool for collecting qualitative data at scale. A well-crafted open-ended question can deliver robust insight you would not otherwise uncover. Be considerate when you add them and follow best practices, however, because adding too many or placing them too late in a survey could reduce the quality of responses you collect.
2: Test often and test early
With the world increasingly digital, the speed in which consumer opinion changes can be dramatic. To be competitive and remain relevant, meaningful data is critical, so collect it early and often to maximise campaign effectiveness.
Test early
It’s important to gain insights and test early to give your team enough time to make actionable changes based on survey insights. Just like with any experiment, sometimes the outcome is different than what you predicted. To optimise your campaign ROI, give your business the time it will need to course correct.
Test often
Once you’ve tested early, make sure to test often. Consumer opinion is always changing and testing often will allow for in-the-moment insights that will make the most impact on your business decisions. When it comes to new concepts and campaigns, there are risks associated with making assumptions on how your audience will react to a message.
3: Use customisable tools that offer flexibility
Flexibility in insights gathering is key for maximising ROI from any marketing program. Choosing the right tools and partners for data collection will allow you to meet time, audience and quality expectations.
Sometimes existing agile solutions, like those created by Kantar, are just the tool you need to execute research quickly and efficiently. But other times, a custom approach is what you’ll need to fulfil your research requirements.
Why flexibility matters
Flexibility allows you to quickly respond to audience feedback and market changes – before launching a campaign or product. By using customisable research tools, you can get answers to your specific research questions using methodologies or question sets designed for your business. This agility keeps your business ahead in a competitive market and ensures investments are being made based on reliable data-driven insights.
Flexible solutions
Flexible solutions are essential in an ever-changing consumer data landscape. Kantar Profiles’ quick-turn survey tools are designed to offer fast and easy ways to collect quality data with expert support. From self-serve and templated options to fully managed quick-turn solutions, our Accelerated Answers survey solutions offer a cost-effective way to collect data fast.
4: Collaborate with experts
One of the best ways to make sure you’re collecting meaningful data from consumers is to partner with industry experts.
Importance of expert support
Running quick-turn DIY surveys might sound like a good idea. It’s often cheaper. But working with these tools, as well as asking the right questions in the right way to the right people isn’t as straight-forward as it may seem. Also, many DIY tools don’t offer account support as quickly or as efficiently as you may need.
Employing experts to support quick-turn research will help you meet timing and quality expectations to time-critical questions, thus reducing launch delays and improving ROI.
Researching with high-quality panel
Another key element of any test is having a quality panel. Collecting data quickly is key when running testing research, but the reliability of the answers collected is also critical. You’ll want to have confidence that the respondents answering your surveys are real people who are who they say they are and avoid survey fraud, which can dramatically skew your research results.
That’s why it’s particularly important to partner with a company that sources survey respondents from quality panels. If you’re looking to understand what your audience really thinks of your ads or concepts, then making decisions based on the opinions of real, engaged responses will improve your ROI.
5: Avoid data fraud for accurate insights
As mentioned above, when it comes to boosting ROI, accurate data is essential in effective decision-making. However, panel fraud can significantly distort your insights, leading to misguided strategies and wasted resources. To ensure the integrity of your data, it’s essential to know you’re protected from fraud.
The impact of data fraud
Panel fraud can manifest in various forms, such as disengaged respondents, dishonest respondents and survey hackers. These fraudulent activities can skew your results, making it difficult to accurately assess your audience’s preferences and the performance of your ads. This can lead to poor decision-making, reduced effectiveness of your campaigns, and a lower ROI.
Advanced detection technologies
Kantar Profiles combats fraudulent data with Qubed AI, our proprietary, industry-leading anti-fraud technology that uses advanced machine learning and AI. Qubed AI is designed to swiftly detect signs of fraud and poor user behaviour, ensuring only real, engaged people enter your surveys. By leveraging years of data collection and a wide range of quantifiable measures and behavioural analysis, Qubed AI identifies fraudsters in milliseconds. This cutting-edge technology detects fraud where humans and other technology cannot. Don’t make costly decisions due to data fraud.
Integrating AI and automation into modern concept testing
As timelines shorten and expectations increase, AI and automation play an important role in improving concept testing. These technologies help brands gather insights faster, process larger volumes of data, and identify patterns that would be hard to detect manually. For example, AI can analyse open-ended survey responses to find common themes and sentiment, giving you a deeper view of how people feel about your concepts.
Automation can also support the quality and reliability of your data. Kantar tools help detect suspicious or low-quality responses quickly, so your findings are based on real, engaged people. This reduces the time spent cleaning data and increases confidence in the results. By combining AI and strong research design, Kantar helps teams test more versions, compare performance, and refine concepts more often. This makes it easier to react to feedback and make decisions at the speed the market requires.
Moving forward with confidence
Improving your concept testing is about asking the right questions, at the right time, to the right people, so you can make confident decisions. Testing early and often, using flexible research tools, working with experienced experts, and protecting your data from fraud all contribute to stronger outcomes and higher ROI. These practices help ensure your concepts are built around real consumer needs and are better prepared to succeed in the market.
Kantar supports organisations at every stage of this process, from survey design and sampling to data quality and interpretation. If you are ready to strengthen your ad and concept testing, get in touch with our experts. We can help you choose the right approach for your objectives and provide the insights you need to move forward with clarity and confidence.
