Technology Market Validation Case Study: New Product Testing with Market Research

At Silicon Valley Research Group (SVRG), we spend a lot of time applying our market research techniques to new products, especially for Technology Market Validation. We are constantly asked how most of our technology market validation research work is produced; here are 7 key steps to effectively use market research for new product testing:

1. Get the Easy Answers.
   Uncover the market landscape using secondary data sources including syndicated research from IDC, Forrester and Gartner. Unfortunately many companies stop at this step in their new product strategy development efforts.

2. Discover Customer Personas & Characteristics.
   Every new product will face a new set of customer expectations and demands. The new product’s out-of-the box experience needs to delight and exceed all expectations. This is where we run the product or prototypes through our tool for new product market research: Customer Anthropology Labs, a qualitative effort combined with disciplined and systematic listening for nuances in customer feedback. DO NOT BE WILLING TO SETTLE FOR SATISFACTION! Go for maximum customer delight in this step.

3. Intense Client Engagement.
   The client needs to be maximally engaged in this step. While we pride ourselves in our independent execution abilities in client projects, this is one area where we insist on full engagement from our clients and their product development teams. Plan to attend all the customer lab sessions!

4. Quantitative Validation.
   Using Customer Anthropology Lab results, we craft an online survey to elicit feedback from a large representative pool of target audience respondents. Advanced analytics and modeling techniques such as discrete choice, conjoint analysis or TURF analysis are often deployed to enable maximum granularity into new product market research data collected and compiled.

5. Social Data Collection.
   Using powerful tools, social sentiment around key words relating to the new product and/or competitive offerings is analyzed for significant clues. This data is a critical component and is incorporated into the overall findings. Online product reviews of existing competitive or complementary products are a key input here

6. Behavioral Data Synthesis.
   Not to be ignored, a company's 'big data" is an invaluable source of data and product inspiration. Drawing from website data, transactional data, CRM inputs as well as other unstructured data elements are mined for pattern recognition.

7. Dissemination & Socialization.
   Lastly and most importantly, we want to help the insights we gather to live beyond the market validation research report. We provide workshop style final presentations, we focus on data visualization and data interactivity so that clients of all levels can easily engage and explore the insights.

Are there any other steps that you feel are critical new product strategy development and technology market validation success? Please leave them in the comment section below. If you would like to learn about how Silicon Valley Research Group can help with your new product market research, new product strategy development and technology market validation research please contact us.