A Case for the Realistic Concept in Testing

Marketers and researchers always grapple with how best to serve up concepts to consumers for testing purposes. The general guiding principle (and it is a good one, from our perspective) is: "Put on your best face, but be aware of the real-world limitations of media. How much can you say, really, in a 30-second TV spot?"

It is a good rule because it cuts to the chase. A product may have seven great benefits, but research shows that you are usually best served to focus communications on the top one, two, or, maybe, three benefits.

Too often, we see good concepts for which the consumer research interest ratings are still too high. This is generally because the concepts under-represent the devil in the details: the small print, the fair balance, the user instructions, the back-label warnings, etc.

Ipsos is increasingly making use of a testing device we call "the realistic concept." This is a concept that tells the whole story about the product, scars and all. Marketers intuitively and immediately resist identifying their product's weaknesses, believing it only makes sense in sectors like the pharmaceutical industry, where downside communication is a regulated requirement. We don't think so. We think the idea has broader application.

What is a realistic concept?

Consider digital photo printers. This has been a rapidly evolving category, and digital camera owners are only recently wising up to the usage specifics of adjunct printers that are available. The examples below demonstrate the idea.

While these are hypothetical concepts, when we test these types of concepts, it is common to see a significant difference in purchase intent and other measures between the two treatments (with the realistic concept scoring lower, obviously). So, what is truth?

We know that some consumers will get excited about a benefits-only message and will act on it. Others will be more cautious, gather the facts, watch their neighbor, and then decide. Early adopters have a higher proclivity to be the first on the block to own new products, while later adopters wait, and thus will have more information when they finally do decide whether to buy. It can be a useful exercise in the analysis of concept test results to segment the population into adoption segments--and there are many ways to do this--and weigh the results of the concept scores by segment sizes of early versus late adopters.

Marketers often ignore the effect of the negative aspects of their product ideas. The realistic concept lets you isolate the impact of deterrents, quantify them, and, ultimately, address them in marketing communications and/or product design.

The determination of the truth depends on a number of factors. Realistic concepts can deliver more valuable responses for certain products and categories:

• If you are more interested in the long-term potential of a product. The longer your time horizon for planning based on concept test results, the larger the consumer population who will be fully informed.
• If you are creating a category or sub-category that is new-to-the-world. This means more risk in consumer decision-making and thus more information seeking.
• You market an expensive product. Again, this entails more information seeking among consumers.
• If you market products in a category where some downside communication is required: pharmaceuticals/health, many financial services sectors, products for children and teens, etc.
• If you market products in the technology sector, where innovation diffusion is widely accepted as the way product trial evolves.

The notion of a realistic concept is not new to market research, but it is exceptionally underutilized. It is an excellent tool for concept testing, forecasting, and optimization research, especially in combination with testing a parallel, more benefits-oriented concept. An abundance of products that fail do so because they were tested using concepts that painted too rosy a picture. Had the notion of a realistic concept been explored, some of these failures would have been prevented.