Product Testing Research: The Science Behind Successful Product Launches

A whopping 90% of new products fail each year. The culprit? Failing to conduct adequate product testing research before launching.

Skipping this step could jeopardize your financial investment, damage your brand reputation, and erode customer trust. And beyond these obvious risks, you could alienate your audience, lose market share to competitors, or even face legal and compliance issues.

You’ve got way too much at stake to rely on gut feelings and anecdotal support for your product — and there’s no wiggle room for failure.

Thankfully, product testing provides an easy way to reduce risks when launching your new product. In this article, we’ll explore methodological, scientific approach to product testing research that gives you solid data and actionable insights.

What is product testing research?  

Product testing research is the process of letting real users try out a product to see what works, what doesn’t, and what could be better. It’s a way to gather honest feedback on performance, quality, and usability, helping fine-tune the product before it hits the market.

Product testing is vital for improving product quality and ensuring a good market fit, but it can feel like taking a shot in the dark if you’re not well-versed in the science that backs it up. Product testing research grounds these efforts in proven study design methods that lead to valuable insights.

A product test encompasses planning and designing, selecting participants, conducting the test, and analyzing the results. The research behind this process gives you methodologies to work with, strategies for getting better data, data analysis techniques to see what’s really going on, and much more.

Does market research product testing apply to concept validation and testing?

Sometimes you want to test an idea, not a fully-fledged product.  Concept testing is the process of verifying whether your idea for a product has real potential to succeed in the marketplace. It’s a way to confirm that your concept is perceived as valuable or desirable and that your target market will be willing to pay for it.

Product testing market research helps inform concept validation. This includes testing methodologies, the relative benefits of collecting qualitative vs. quantitative data, and survey design best practices.

What should a CPG company be familiar with before  conducting product testing research?

Product testing  should build upon a solid foundation of knowledge about your customers and competitors. Although testing can help clarify many things, it’s good to gather as much data as you can on the following before you start:

• Your target market and demographics. Can you picture the type of person who will be most interested in your products?  
• The competitive landscape around you. What are your competitors offering, and how do you measure up?
• Your customers’ pain points. What are the problems/concerns/desires pushing people to buy products like yours?

In addition to these, it helps to get an understanding of the concept of agility. Agility in product development means having a flexible, iterative approach to creating and improving products. It’s all about being able to adapt, experiment, and learn quickly, so that you can respond more quickly to changes in customer needs, market conditions, and technological advancements.

Agility is as important to legacy brands as it is to emerging brands. In fact, legacy brands should always approach product testing with the attitude of an emerging brand that prioritizes testing early and often.

See how Highlight customer Clorox has moved away from stage gate testing to agile product development in this recap from Quirk’s Chicago 2024

What are the steps involved in product testing research?

Congratulations, you’ve got a near-market-ready product, and you’re ready to find out what your target customers think! Now it’s time for meticulous planning, explicit goal-setting, and maybe a little soul-searching.

Step 1: Define your objectives

Are you testing for usability, customer satisfaction, market fit, or something else? This will be the basis for your product test design.

Step 2: Choose a product testing methodology

Product testing techniques in market research include online surveys, in-home usage testing (IHUT), focus groups, ethnographic studies, and more. For surveys, you’ll want to carefully select your questions based on product research best practices. For IHUT or central location testing (CLT), you’ll need to devise a sequence of tasks for your testers to perform that will give you concrete consumer insights.

Step 3: Finalize your product

This might be a no-brainer, but make sure your product is test-ready!! Testers should be able to engage with it as though they’ve just picked it up at a supermarket or ordered it online. Highlight’s vertical integration — in which product prep, audience selection, mailing, and data collection are handled under one umbrella — helps tremendously with this.

Not sure if you’re ready to invest in a large-scale product test? Try doing a smaller pilot study first to see if there are any flaws in your methodology.

Replicating real-world consumer experiences in testing environments

Central location testing gives you a controlled environment in which to manage variables more easily and observe participants in a structured setting. However, product testing research indicates that this controlled environment may actually make the conclusions of your test less valuable.

How often do you apply skincare products in a drab conference room with researchers standing all around? Probably never. This is one of the downsides of CLT — it’s difficult to get authentic feedback when your testing audience feels put on the spot in an unfamiliar space.

In-home usage testing overcomes this issue by letting your testers try things out in the comfort of their own homes. You’ll get much more accurate, honest feedback this way. It’s not that the central location testing audience is trying to deceive you; it’s just that spending two to three hours in an office setting isn’t what usually makes them want to pop open a canned cocktail.

In some cases, there’s really no meaningful alternative to IHUT. These include product testing for pets, newborns, and very young children. (Can you imagine bringing your cat to a business park building to try out a self-cleaning litter box alongside a dozen other cats?)

When choosing a product testing company to work with, gauging how well they can help you gather quality data through IHUT is key — especially if you’re looking for nuanced qualitative and ethnographic data.  

The science of target audience selection

Cobbling together a good-enough testing audience may be somewhat easy, but deliberately constructing one that will help you get a wealth of statistically significant customer insights takes a lot of meticulous work. And there’s a science to it.

First off, you need a sample size that’s big enough to draw legitimate conclusions from the data you collect. For survey-based quantitative methods like MaxDiff analysis, product research and testing best practices state that you should have at least 200 respondents for each audience segment. For ethnographic studies in which you’re looking for more open-ended feedback, smaller audiences are fine — especially since it takes more work to sift through the data.

Then there’s the matter of segmenting your testing audience into target customer groups that are relevant for your study. Highlight can help you test with “super-niche” consumer groups — i.e., those that compose less than 3% of the general population.

Getting real-time visibility into your data

Not a data scientist or stats person? That’s OK — as long as you’re working with someone who is. Luckily, Highlight’s team has strong market research expertise, which is why we offer so many tools for real-time data visibility and post-survey analysis.

One reason why it’s good to test your products often is that you can use the data from previous product tests as normative data to improve your insights from future tests. This process is known as product benchmarking.  

Ethical considerations and the science of overcoming participant bias

Clear communication is essential for running an ethical product test. Be clear with your participants about how you plan to use the research findings. Document your methods to ensure that your testing is reproducible in the future.

Avoiding bias among participants can be difficult, but it’s very important. Disclose any conflicts of interest that could bias participants, and avoid offering compensation that’s large enough to compel people to sing your praises unauthentically. You want the truth, not a love-fest.

Product testing research has a number of best practices that can help get authentic reactions from participants. For example, in surveys and interviews, you should avoid asking leading questions because they put ideas in people’s heads. (“Do you agree that our mascara makes your eyelashes look naturally thicker?” is an example of a leading question.)  

Product launch confidence comes from methodical product research and testing

Don’t let your immense investment in product design, development, and marketing go down the drain. Even if you’re feeling confident in your product launch success, remember that true confidence comes from taking a methodical, well-researched approach to product testing.

Highlight’s IHUT platform and product testing market research tools make it easy to build a good testing audience, streamline the logistics, and collect solid data that leads to actionable customer insights. When in doubt, test — and use the science behind product testing to your advantage.