Product Research How-To For New Product Development.
So you think you know your product, eh? How much insight did you collect from your prospective clients to find out if your product resonates with their needs and values? Aha!
Getting consumers’ reactions to your new product or service when it is still being developed, enlightens you about any further development so it suits your intended market. Before you launch your product or service, you need to conduct thorough research to find out:
- Whether the product or service might be successful.
- If there are similar products on the market.
- Which are the best ways to develop, manufacture and sell your own.
This is product research, and it is a key step of new product development. Through every stage of your product development process you must conduct product research, which will help you in identifying key issues and thus avoiding costly mistakes.
The initial product research will help you evaluate your idea for a new product and service and see if there is a need for it and what it is that your potential customers are looking for. If your product or service already exists, product research will tell you whether the available options on the market are meeting the needs and expectations of existing customers. This way you can learn what you can do differently, to meet the needs and expectations but also to exceed and outdo the competition.
The How of Conducting Product Research.
So how do you conduct product research? You start by taking a look around to see what is available on the market, shopping around, looking at the ads in magazines, newspapers and on TV and online. Once you understand what the market has to offer, you need to find out if there is a demand for your product or service.
You should then conduct a survey: it could be an online survey with a digital market research tool like JAMA, phone survey, face-to-face interview or perhaps a paper survey where the respondents get the survey sent by regular mail. The latter might not be appreciated by the respondents as it usually means it is a rigorous process to send their answers back to you by mail.
Online surveys are the method to conduct product research at a low cost, plus these allow you to see data patterns much more quickly.
One of Steve Jobs’s famous quotes is “It isn’t the consumers job to know what they want”. There is only a little bit of truth to this statement because the results from a product research survey will serve as an essential baseline measurement of what your market expectations are. The results are not a guarantee that your new product or service is a success, they do provide you with an insight into what it is that customers are looking for, and that itself is very helpful.
Ready to start a product research campaign now? Use this link.
GETJAMA’s mobile market research platform helps businesses understand the consumer through a combination of qualitative & quantitative feedback collection tools without disrupting the product experience.
