Key Research Questions: how can we maximise the success of a new launch?

New Products and Services: How behavioural science can help make sure every new product and service has the best chance of success

Right now in almost every sector a marketing and product team is shocked a new product or service is failing. 85% of products fail when companies don’t talk to consumers, and even when a company does there is still a very high chance of failure. Traditional product testing research can sometimes give a steer as to potential success but there still exists a lot of uncertainty. It’s very common for respondents to overclaim how likely they are to purchase a product or, critically, overestimate how much they would pay for a new product.

At the root of this problem is that both surveys and respondents rely on past experiences to predict future choices, and consciously humans aren’t great at predicting future behaviour and motivations. Much of our decision making is based on System 1 or System 3 thinking, but the classical product test is as rational, or System 2, as it comes.

This is why one of the key questions clients ask us is how can we accurately predict and maximise the chances of success of a new product or service?

Our answer is to replicate the future decision-making process as accurately as possible and, in turn, accurately predict future decision-making. We create an immersive mindset, simulate the purchase environment and test key parameters thorough behavioural conjoint and behavioural product testing.

Application

This is exactly the kind of question we were asked to answer for a major British multinational telecommunications brand. It wasn’t a specific product the brand wanted to test, they wanted to make sure their entire portfolio of innovative technology products were relevant to customers and met genuine customer needs. Over a two year period we tested a dozen new products to ensure they met customer needs and maximise success on launch.

We created a behavioural science framework to understand the whole customer journey:

• Needs: a behavioural qualitative approach that included gamification, therapy techniques, linguistic analysis, and story sharing, in order to uncover less obvious needs. This was combined with System 3 narrative quant to understand the stories consumers tell about their lives and technology.
• Touchpoints: Using behavioural frameworks and ethnography to map out the full customer journey and find all the key touchpoints where customer choices can be influenced. The journey for most consumer products includes the usual stages like brand awareness, recognising a need, research and choice. But the customer journey for subscription products like a mobile contract has a whole extra dimension: the monthly cycle of billing, usage, and the regular opportunity for upgrade. Each step in this journey has its own psychology and emotional arc, and a behavioural ethnography approach identifies how to frame an offer at each stage to fit the customer’s mindset and maximise conversion.
• Pricing: behavioural conjoint (an enhanced version of traditional conjoint) is used to test product variants, features, price points, and product names to identify the most effective combination. The difference in behavioural conjoint is that respondents are immersed in a realistic purchasing environment that looks and feels like a genuine branded app or website interaction. This allows us to understand the impact of the brand and existing relationship with willingness to purchase.

Impact

The behavioural innovation process was deployed across global markets to successfully launch new or updated products in various ways; guaranteed broadband speeds, new ways of financing and trade-in options, insurance offerings and payment innovations. Across the portfolio the brand has generated billions of pounds by finding the customers who most need these products, offering them at the right moments to create space in their lives and framing them to show how these benefits can be affordable and worth paying for.

Traditional product testing based in past experience fails because a new product is exactly that - new. With no past experience of a new product or service the old way of testing can only ever replicate a System 2 rational choice; only a third of the decision making process. Behavioural product testing recreates context, makes decisions more realistic, and measures emotional and narrative responses that allow us to replicate the full process and ensure each and every product has the best chance of success.

If you want to chat more about behavioural product testing, get in touch at hello@irrationalagency.com