New Product Positioning

How to Make Sure A New Product Received the Right Spotlight

The Challenge

During the course of bringing to market a new and updated version of a current product mainstay, an Actionable Research client wished to insure they were both on the right track with the product design and also were talking about the right improvements. Further, they were selecting a completely new positioning for the product and the brand in general, and required feedback from their customers and channels to understand main themes and messages. Messaging and positioning needed to go hand in hand with design improvements, but was this possible? Was the company’s design and messaging cogent or did they tell opposing stories? In particular, which one of several great stories is the best story to use?

The Approach

Rolling up its sleeves, Actionable Research debriefed both engineering and marketing, as well as agency staff to understand the components to be measured, in addition to the hypotheses currently in play. The team then implemented a very simple yet effective means of understanding which dimensions of the new design were most striking and enabled it to be differentiated. More important, the study was conducted blinded as to the sponsor of the research, so several hypothetical manufacturers’ brands were able to be tested. The study was done in a group format, leveraging peer interactions generated by comments and explored exhaustively. The qualitative exercise was followed up by a quantitative survey.

The Result

Actionable Research was able to clearly see which dimensions of the product were best received; they were also able to see which dimensions did not work as well. Further, optimal positioning for the new product was also clearly identified, and successful post tests of these messages proved to be best in class, including those of competitive devices. In this case, not only was our client able to make a decision on positioning based on real results, but they were later able to independently verify the decision made at the time was indeed the best decision.