Concept Testing

Concept testing focuses on the basic product idea.

Concept testing is part of product / service development research; it precedes test marketing and determines consumer acceptance of the new product / service / design idea prior to its introduction to the market.

It’s often but not always, a qualitative research study that’s employed to develop and improve the concept.

What is concept testing?
Concept testing surveys can be described as either monadic, sequential monadic or comparative, these terms refer to how the concepts are displayed and from our expertise and experience we would advise on the best approach to take.

However, in summary, a monadic survey, the concept is tested in isolation, i.e. each respondent is only asked about one concept and it’s the same concept for all respondents. A sequential monadic survey is where more than one concept is evaluated, i.e. each respondent is exposed to more than one concept, one after another. A comparative concept survey is where each respondent is shown the concepts next to each other.

The actual research methodology for concept testing is usually driven by what is to be tested. For example, visual concepts can be tested with online or face to face interviewing techniques, whereas something like a taste-test would need to be conducted either in a hall test or with in-home interviews.