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The importance of product testing BEFORE investing in marketing materials Here is a back issue of Marketing Booster, the email newsletter that Richard Groom writes and sends free every fortnight to subscribers. You can subscribe here or read over 60 back issues using the back issues index page. I was leafing through a book about John Lennon this week and read a great quote from Yoko Ono. She was explaining why she gave up on her music career in the mid-80s. She said: "It's silly to bring something out when there is no demand." Marketers will nod their heads in agreement. I've used the example before of clients of mine who showed a mock-up brochure of a new service they were developing to a focus group of potential customers. The group raised a lot of objections they would have to using the service. For my clients, this helped them avoid the wasted expense of launching a service for which there would have been little demand. They are now involved in developing the service and re-testing the concept. By the same token, you could argue that it's silly to spend thousands on marketing materials without first doing some testing. I would advise anyone to consider building some 'copy testing' or 'concept testing' into the production schedule. You may well already be familiar with the idea: measuring the effectiveness of something before it is published. It's not an exact science and there are different opinions on its value. But I think it is something that can bring some much-needed feedback to the process of writing and designing communications materials. You might mock up a brochure and show it to some existing clients, as mentioned in my example above. Ideally, you would produce a few alternative concepts or sets of text and measure the reaction to each one. Of course, you can also do some test marketing by running a trial of your marketing communications. You might run an advertisement or direct mail campaign in a selected area or with a sample group of recipients. You'd measure the response, run another concept and compare the response rates. With a client of mine who sells a low-cost product to consumers, we ran an ad in the local press for a few weeks and measured the number of responses. (We did this by including a money-off coupon in the ad that people had to bring with them.) Then we ran another ad and once again measured the response. In this case, the response to the first ad was clearly much higher than to the second. I bet that nothing I've written is new to you. These aren't stunning new ideas. Even so, I would guess that the majority of marketing communication materials produced, especially by small and medium sized organisations, are not tested before they are printed and put to use. For a relatively small expense, it would be possible to do some testing that could help you greatly improve the effectiveness of your materials. So my suggestion is that you build some kind of testing into the schedule for your next marketing communications project, whether it's advertising, a brochure, a web site or whatever. It needn't be too difficult or too costly. I'm not an expert in market research, so I haven't attempted to go into detail about the methods you'd use. If you are serious about this - and especially if you are planning to spend a lot on marketing communications materials - I suggest you find a specialist researcher to help you. Whatever approach you take, surely it's worth a little effort to do some testing before committing to expensive print runs, ad campaigns or other communications activity. Copyright 2004 Richard Groom |