Initial Market Insights

Gaining insights from your target market is an invaluable part of the product development process. During this stage we will approach users of the target market using an online survey service. We will ask the users questions about your product, it’s potential features and the approximate pricing that they’d be happy to pay for the item. This stage of work often bring invaluable feedback and reassurance as we look to move the concept forward into the prototyping stages.

Our Process

Building the Survey

The market insights stage usually comes after the Product Concept Development stage, during which we will have explored various solutions and potential concepts for your product. It might be really obvious which concept you’d like to move forward with, or there might be features or concepts that you’re unsure about. The queries you have might be about the overall concepts or specific details that need ironing out. For example, one concept might utilise poppers and another might incorporate a zip and you’re not sure which fastener your target market would prefer. It is often these seemingly small details that can make a huge difference to the sales numbers of your product and getting clear direction for them on these choices can be very reassuring. Your designer will spend time with you building each questions carefully, ensuring they aren’t open-ended and that they cover all the aspects of the design.

Getting the insights

Once the survey goes live, it’s mostly waiting for all the responses to come in. We keep a close eye on the responses, to ensure that they look genuine and that they are being collected at a good rate. Very occasionally, if the product has a very specific target market (such as dog owners with Labradors with arthritis) it can be harder to reach 200 respondents. We will inform you if this becomes apparent and look for ways in which to get the feedback through alternative routes. The survey usually takes between 2-3 weeks to get all the responses, but it can be faster if your target market is very large. Getting a quick response can be a good sign that there is a large market for your new product idea!

Collating the feedback

Data Analysis: Once all the responses are in, the real work begins. Our team meticulously analyzes the data, sifting through each response to discern patterns, preferences, and valuable insights. We don’t just tally up answers; we delve into the nuances of the feedback. This could involve cross-referencing answers to find correlations or identifying outliers that might indicate new opportunities or unforeseen challenges.
Interpreting Feedback: The raw data from the survey is transformed into actionable insights. We interpret what your potential customers are really saying, reading between the lines to understand their latent needs and desires. This phase is crucial, as it turns quantitative data into qualitative insights, giving depth and dimension to the numbers.
Comprehensive Reporting: The culmination of this process is a detailed report, presented in a clear and digestible format. This report includes not only the survey findings but also our expert recommendations. It serves as a vital document, guiding subsequent stages of product development. The report highlights key trends, potential red flags, and areas ripe for innovation, giving you a roadmap for moving forward with confidence.
Feedback Integration: Finally, we discuss the report with you, ensuring you understand every aspect of the feedback and its implications. This is an interactive session where you can ask questions, seek clarifications, and brainstorm how to integrate these insights into your product development. The goal is to ensure that the feedback loop is complete and that you are equipped with the knowledge to make informed decisions for the next stages of your product’s journey.

Strategic Direction and Confidence

Undertaking the Market Insights stage injects your product development journey with a strategic direction and confidence that is hard to attain elsewhere. This isn’t just about gathering data; it’s about grounding your product in reality, ensuring that it aligns with market demands and expectations.

Imagine this: you’ve developed a product based on an idea you believed was needed, only to find out later that it doesn’t resonate with your audience. Market Insights help you avoid this costly misstep. By understanding your audience’s desires and pain points early on, you can make informed decisions that shape your product into something that not only solves a problem but does so in a way that’s desirable to those who matter most – your future customers.

It’s about moving forward with a concept not just based on intuition, but with market-validated confidence.

Cost and Time Efficiency

Conducting market research before further development stages can save both time and financial resources. Gaining insights early on helps you avoid investing in features or designs that your target market may not value, thus preventing unnecessary expenditure on development, manufacturing, or marketing strategies that don’t align with customer needs. For instance, learning that certain high-cost features are not a priority for your target market allows you to simplify your design, reducing both production costs and time to market. This efficient allocation of resources not only preserves your budget but also accelerates the development process, enabling you to launch a product that is both financially viable and timely. This approach exemplifies the principle of “failing fast and cheaply,” where potential missteps are identified early when the cost of change is relatively low, thus safeguarding your investment as you progress through the development stages.

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Market-Driven Decision Making

Our Market Insights service empowers you to make decisions based on real market data, not just assumptions. By understanding your potential customers’ preferences, you can tailor your product to meet their needs more effectively. This might involve choosing the right materials, design features, or even deciding on the key functionalities of your product. This data-driven approach significantly enhances the chances of your product resonating with your target audience and succeeding in the market. For example, discovering that a majority of your potential customers prioritize eco-friendliness could lead you to focus on sustainable materials, giving your product a competitive edge. By aligning your product development with actual market needs, you reduce the risk of misalignment between your product and customer expectations, setting a solid foundation for commercial success.

FAQs

What are initial market insights?

Initial market insights are the preliminary data and feedback gathered from your target market about a new product idea. This information typically includes consumer opinions on product features, usability, price points, and overall demand. It’s about understanding how potential customers perceive your product and identifying their needs and preferences. This stage often involves surveying or interviewing a representative sample of your target audience to gain a clear picture of their expectations and the market’s potential receptiveness to your product.

How can initial market insights benefit a business?

Initial market insights are crucial for businesses, especially startups, as they help validate product ideas before investing heavily in development. By understanding what your target market truly wants, you can tailor your product to better meet these needs, increasing the likelihood of its success. These insights guide decision-making in design, feature prioritisation, pricing strategy, and even marketing approaches. Essentially, they reduce the risk of product failure by ensuring your product development aligns with actual market demands and customer preferences.

What tools are used to gather initial market insights?

Various tools can be used to gather initial market insights, including online surveys, focus groups, in-depth interviews, and social media analytics. Online survey platforms like SurveyMonkey or Google Forms are common for collecting quantitative data, while focus groups and interviews provide qualitative insights. Social media platforms and analytics tools can also be valuable for understanding consumer sentiment and trends. Additionally, analyzing competitor products and market reports can offer broader market insights. We use an online survey platform to provide a useful but relatively low cost initial market insights service but this can be expanded utilising focus groups etc. if required and budgets allow.

How does the market insights affect my IP?

Initial market insights significantly influence marketing strategies by providing a deep understanding of your target audience. These insights help in crafting a marketing message that resonates with potential customers, choosing the right marketing channels, and even shaping the overall brand narrative. For example, if insights reveal that your target market highly values sustainability, your marketing strategy can focus on highlighting the eco-friendly aspects of your product. Understanding customer preferences and pain points allows you to tailor your marketing efforts to address these specific areas, thereby enhancing the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.

How do initial marketing insights influence marketing strategies?

Overview of Initial Market Insights

As an innovative design consultancy, we are often approached by people with great ideas for products that they’ve thought of as a result of personal challenges or frustrations. They’ve often received positive feedback from family and friends and feel certain that a huge number of people will be facing similar issues and therefore want to buy their product. However, quite honestly, this isn’t always the case. Often, family and friends can be very biased in their feedback, or be more positive than they feel, not wanting to hurt feelings. It’s vital to get honest, unbiased feedback from your target market about the concept, in order to truly establish the potential value of the product.

This stage usually comes straight after the Product Concept Development stage, before any CAD models or prototypes are built. Doing this market research early on in the development process might result in a clear indication that the project isn’t viable. Your target market may not be willing to pay the price that the product needs to be in order to be commercially viable or they may think that the problem isn’t big enough to induce them to purchase the product in the first place. This is actually a really good outcome from the insights stage. It has the potential to save you thousands of pounds in development and manufacturing costs. It’s always better to find out as early as possible if your product isn’t going to sell.

On the other hand, if the feedback is positive, the market insights feedback can aid vital decision making about all aspects of the product, including material choices, size, colour, functionality and price point. This knowledge informs subsequent design a prototyping stages, giving both you and the designer, facts on which to base your choices.

It also really helps you to have a better understanding of the people in your target market and how they think. As you move forward with the project, and begin to think about branding, sales and marketing strategies, you can use this information to build your brand and any campaigns, websites or marketing assets.

You may have concerns about sharing your concept at this early stage, to such a large group of people, especially if you are in conversation with an IP attorney and there are protectable elements to the design. There are two ways in which we aim to protect your IP whilst still gaining the valuable feedback you require. Firstly, the terms and conditions of the survey platform we use, require confidentiality, and we reiterate this with respondents at the beginning of each survey, to remind them of their commitment to non-disclosure. Secondly, and especially if IP is fundamental to the success of your product, we don’t have to reveal the concept during the survey. We can write questions that are more generic and address the problem you are looking to solve without revealing the solution. Alternatively, we can reveal parts of the concept. In this way, we are able to get feedback without risking invalidating your IP. However, if you have any concerns about the market insights stage and the risk to your IP, we would recommend that you seek advice from your patent attorney before commissioning the stage.

Initially, we will work with you to build a survey of between 10-15 questions about the potential features, pricing, functionality, material etc. We also include some screening questions to ensure that the respondents are from your target market. Sometimes the survey will include supporting images, either images that are created as part of this process or images of existing products or parts of the concept. We have a lot of experience at asking questions that will lead to useful data and clear direction. The survey is run on a specialised survey platform that we use, and we usually get around 200 responses. If you want to run the survey in a specific region (i.e. the US or Germany), or if you’d like to include more questions or get extra responses, this is all possible, but it will add to the cost.

Once the survey is live, it can take a few weeks for all the responses to be gathered. When we have all the responses, your designer will spend time collating and interpreting all the feedback, looking for trends and key feedback. This is all drawn together into a report that details our findings and recommendations. This document can be used as a foundation for the next stages of work and will influence key decisions through the product development process.