5 Tips for Creating a New Product or Solution

I’ve written before about how much I detest our industry’s aversion to change, but today I’d like to be positive and talk about how we can change while not selling out the principles that should drive market research. Here are five that I’ve used in coming up with new solutions.

1. Focus on What Is Important and Dump the Rest – I’ve always been a custom researcher and so I tend to want to cover every nuance of an objective before deciding that I’ve done my job. The trouble with this is it can lead to higher budgets and longer schedules. Fine if the issue is a long term strategic goal, but unworkable in a world where clients are making decisions faster than ever before.
2. Set a Budget – Now this might sound like a cart before the horse issue, but I have found it is easier to be true to point 1 if you start off by establishing your budget. Let’s face it, who has not had a client say that they want to accomplish some set of objectives but only have a very limited amount to spend? When that happens we realize that we’ll have to compromise and we come up with something that might not get into every nuance, but that does help the client make a better decision. In determining your budget you should start by thinking about the cheapest you could imagine doing it for and going well below that (I’d start with half). You might not be able to achieve it but the lower you start the more it will help you to avoid issues discussing in the first point above.
3. Set a Time Frame – Identical logic to number two. We’ve all had crash projects that had to be achieved in a ridiculously short time frame and we generally figure out a way to accomplish them. Here again, look at the fastest you’ve ever done something in the past and see if you can figure out how to cut that time in half.
4. Talk to Clients and Prospects – This is basic. There are unfulfilled needs out there. Some are things the client side researchers can tell you right off (“I’d really like it if you could…”) and some are things they don’t think about because they assume they can’t be done. So have conversations about both. For the things they can articulate, ask them exactly what they would need to fulfill that. For the things they can’t articulate, ask them how a new service would be applied to their business (if at all). The answers here will help you create new ideas and refine the ones you have. Most important it will inform on items 1-4 above.
5. Never Stop Doing Good Research – Faster and cheaper doesn’t mean bad. Obviously a thoughtful collaborative custom research effort will provide superior market research…but if the time or budget don’t allow for it, then the “superior” research is useless (either too late to help or too expensive to do in the first place). That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t deliver reliable results…just that you need to understand (and make your clients understand) the limitations that result from the compromises you had to make.

At TRC we recently launched Message Test Express™. The product developed out of a phone call with a prospect who complained that he couldn’t do effective quantitative message testing because time did not allow it. From that conversation we set budget and timing criteria and then tried to figure out how we could help him to do effective message testing within those parameters. As we worked through our plan we went back and got feedback from him and other clients to make sure we were on the right track. Finally, we figured out how to include some advanced methods (we used our proprietary Bracket™ prioritization tool to provide individual level utilities for each message) and useful tools (such as a highlighter tool, heat maps and specialized word clouds) that maximized the reliability and usefulness of the results.

Doing all of the above is no guarantee that the product will be a success (too early to know if Message Test Express™ will be), but I believe they are a good foundation for creating one. Of course the alternative (not trying to innovate) will surely lead to failure.