Teaching Chapter 9: Concept Testing
Timing
This session should be taught during the first portion of the course, after concept generation. This session can follow Concept Selection, or could be done in conjunction with Concept Selection in a compressed course. Of course it is most useful for the students if each of these topics is presented in class before their project work reaches these stages.
Objectives and Strategy
Concept testing is a fairly simple idea and the book chapter lays out the mechanics of a concept test in a fairly straightforward way. We have found that walking the students through a fairly realistic concept test in which they are the subjects is a quite effective way to get them to think through the difficult issues involved with concept testing.
Session Outline
Run a sample concept test.
Complete a purchase intent survey for the electric scooter concept.
Q = N x A x P N is graduate students living off campus (200,000)
A is awareness x availability (0.8 if we do big campus promotions, realistically less than 0.25)
P is 0.4*top-box + 0.2*second-box (maybe less since students are broke)
Compare class results with EMPower story:
EMPower found that college students wanted to pay less than $1000, but in order to build it to that price point required lots of redesign and really expensive tooling. Concept testing forecasts showed that they would not have the volume to make money this way. So they decided to focus on the industrial market in which they could sell the scooter for $2000 and use cheaper tooling, and make profits on lower volumes. They hope to eventually attack the consumer (student) market.
Click here for an MS-Word file with a survey form you can use in class.
This exercise generally stimulates a rich discussion of the pros and cons of concept testing. Some of the issues that generally come up are:
Generally the instructor can stimulate a good discussion by asking whether there are situations in which the team should just "go for it" without a formal concept test. There are many (in industrial practice) who argue this point of view, and suggest that formal market research is worthless or, at best, misleading for truly innovative products.
This session should be taught during the first portion of the course, after concept generation. This session can follow Concept Selection, or could be done in conjunction with Concept Selection in a compressed course. Of course it is most useful for the students if each of these topics is presented in class before their project work reaches these stages.
Objectives and Strategy
Concept testing is a fairly simple idea and the book chapter lays out the mechanics of a concept test in a fairly straightforward way. We have found that walking the students through a fairly realistic concept test in which they are the subjects is a quite effective way to get them to think through the difficult issues involved with concept testing.
Session Outline
Run a sample concept test.
Complete a purchase intent survey for the electric scooter concept.
- Sample population-college students who live 1-3 miles from campus
- Communicate concept with storyboard and video
- Administer survey after each stage (keep track in table on board)
- do analysis on board
Q = N x A x P N is graduate students living off campus (200,000)
A is awareness x availability (0.8 if we do big campus promotions, realistically less than 0.25)
P is 0.4*top-box + 0.2*second-box (maybe less since students are broke)
Compare class results with EMPower story:
EMPower found that college students wanted to pay less than $1000, but in order to build it to that price point required lots of redesign and really expensive tooling. Concept testing forecasts showed that they would not have the volume to make money this way. So they decided to focus on the industrial market in which they could sell the scooter for $2000 and use cheaper tooling, and make profits on lower volumes. They hope to eventually attack the consumer (student) market.
Click here for an MS-Word file with a survey form you can use in class.
This exercise generally stimulates a rich discussion of the pros and cons of concept testing. Some of the issues that generally come up are:
- The importance of the quality of the description in a concept test. (Most students find the Ion video comical in some places, detracting from the reliability of the results.)
- The importance of price, and whether or not to include price in a concept test. Students can generally argue both sides of this issue pretty well.
Generally the instructor can stimulate a good discussion by asking whether there are situations in which the team should just "go for it" without a formal concept test. There are many (in industrial practice) who argue this point of view, and suggest that formal market research is worthless or, at best, misleading for truly innovative products.