With the sad passing of Apple’s Steve Jobs, much has been made of his ability to develop and launch game-changing products that created a new paradigm for their particular category.  A visionary with his finger on the pulse of consumer needs and desires, Jobs’s ability to identify and drive through ideas with potential is well documented and much envied by businesses in every category seeking to develop and launch the holy grail of a game-changing, category re-defining new product.

The culture Jobs established at Apple involves having ongoing, open, two-way dialogues with their lead consumers to fix bugs, service issues and anything else that comes up, leading to deep consumer insight right across the company.  However in the end, when it comes to deciding whether to launch or not, they are so confident that they have enough of a feel for what the consumer wants and where the opportunity is that there is no need to seek further guarantees through consumer testing. 

In fact, it’s been widely noted that consumers in general are pretty bad at evaluating truly new products.  When a product is genuinely new and ground-breaking, consumers simply aren’t equipped with the reference points to evaluate whether or not it has a role in their lives, particularly in the early stages of product development when it’s still a few years until launch.

For example, cast your mind back to a time when Cirque du Soleil didn’t exist.  I’m pretty sure that if you’d asked a group of consumers then whether they would pay £80 a ticket to watch a circus they would have laughed at you – their only reference point for ‘circus’ involved a chilly big top and candy floss in a field.  Even if you explained that it would be a really high-end, well-designed circus where they could drink champagne, taking design cues from opera and musical theatre, I suspect you might have had trouble convincing people it would be worth that £80 to watch (essentially) clowns and acrobats.  Luckily, Cirque du Soleil knew that they had a great product, and passionately pursued their vision, creating the spectacular events that sell out in cities around the world night after night.

This approach is, in a way, exactly how most small businesses operate – close to most of their consumers by virtue of the size of the business, and lacking the funds to run extensive insight or product testing pieces, they are forced to “trust their gut” about what their consumers want.  But for big business, where the innovation and NPD teams are often a few steps removed from its consumers, this instinct for success is hard to replicate, and the default for many companies has become large scale quantitative consumer tests of new product ideas that attempt to predict the likelihood of success – and so decide whether to launch or not. 

However, this testing of new ideas out of context, and asking consumers to rationalise (and often post-rationalise) their reactions, runs counter to all contemporary understanding from the worlds of behavioural economics and psychology of how we evaluate options and make decisions – particularly the role of our unconscious mind in this.  This goes some way to explain why using established consumer research methods to attempt to predict success or failure continues to give advice that is far from definitive.

Of course, developing internal intuition, or at least getting great consumer insight early on in the idea development process is vital (and the topic for a different paper), as is keeping that insight front of mind right through to launch.  But how do you get a more accurate read on the potential success of the product if asking consumers using accepted methodologies gives unreliable answers?

As a general principle, getting the consumer as close to the actual usage or purchase experience as possible helps enormously with accuracy of response.  For example, giving consumers samples of a new product to live with and use in their daily lives over a couple of weeks will give a much more accurate view on if and how they may use it in reality, than simply showing it to them or letting them sample it briefly at a computer terminal or in a research facility.

If the product doesn’t exist yet, sharing the concept with them using a realistic opinion leader and environment for the category rather than a traditional research moderator will also get closer to a real-life response.  For example, having a dermatologist or beautician introduce a new science-based beauty product in a treatment or consulting room, or a hairdresser talking about a new hair care product whilst styling the consumer’s hair.

This principle can work equally well for new intangible ideas – for example, placing mock-ups of marketing and information collateral in bank branches for staff to use when talking to customers about their options, and placing product information on the website, counting click-throughs to measure level of interest.

At point of purchase, if in situ product placement and observation is not possible, create a mock up of the shelf unit or web page, placing the new product amongst its competitors. Or, if you are able, place your new product in Haßloch – a town in Germany that has been adapted for use as a test market for new consumer products. In Haßloch retailers’ shops, products are available in advance of their release to the rest of Germany. On the local cable television network, specially made commercials for these products are shown, and individual editions of newspapers (such as Hörzu and Bunte) are published for Haßloch, with special advertisements for the new products. Some citizens also hold cards with barcodes that can be scanned with every purchase so that an individual household’s shopping habits can be tracked. From this the Gesellschaft für Konsumforschung (“Company for Consumer Research”, GfK) is able to gauge how new products are being received by consumers, with the research matching later market data with an accuracy of 90%.

Technologies such as eye-tracking and neuromarketing also hold massive potential in this area, as they remove the onus from the consumer to interpret (i.e. post-rationalise) their own actions and reactions, and allow the data to speak for itself - and yet these tools are still widely underused. 

It’s time for a re-evaluation how companies use consumer research for innovation. The question is, will businesses relinquish the safety blanket of focus groups and quantitative consumer database evaluation and in ‘stripping away the veil’ bravely embrace these new techniques? I certainly hope so.