One of the biggest challenges you might come across when running a concept test is how to analyze your results in a robust and flexible way without spending so much time that you keep your stakeholders waiting. After all, these results are often crucial for making decisions about advertisements, products, or services.
Here we review what concept testing is and how aytm’s Concept Lab can be your secret weapon for quick turnaround when analyzing concept testing results.
What is concept testing?
Concept tests allow you to feel confident you’re presenting the right solutions to your target audience by letting you validate ideas for products, services, or advertisements before you go to market. Depending on what you’re looking for input on, concept testing lets you present images, videos, or text to respondents and gather their feedback. There are four main types.
1. Monadic testing (single concept)
In monadic testing, respondents are split into different groups. The number of groups will depend on how many concepts you’re testing. Each group evaluates the one concept they’re assigned and gives feedback. The questions you ask about the concept will be used to determine the concept’s performance across key metrics or attributes. Some questions can include things like “how likely are you to purchase this product?” or “how believable is this advertisement?” The results can then be used to make decisions about the development and launch of the concept.
2. Sequential monadic testing (multiple concepts)
Like monadic testing, sequential monadic testing splits respondents into different groups; however, each group will evaluate some or all concepts being tested. This usually takes place one at a time and in a random rotating sequence. After reviewing the concepts, the respondents will answer the same questions for each concept. The questions you ask concerning each concept will be used to determine how they perform across key metrics or attributes. In many cases, having respondents evaluate more than one concept can help reduce your sample size, and with it, your costs.
3. Comparison testing (comparing multiple concepts)
Comparison testing involves respondents evaluating two or more concepts against one another. Here, the questions you should ask respondents revolve around comparing and contrasting concepts by using ratings, rankings, or open-ended responses. This type of concept test will help you easily tell which of your concepts performs the best across a range of attributes.
4. Protomonadic testing (multiple concepts with a preference at the end)
Protomonadic testing combines sequential monadic and comparison testing. Respondents will first evaluate all concepts one at a time in a random rotating sequence. Similar to sequential monadic testing, each respondent should answer the same questions for each concept. What sets this concept test apart is that at the end of the survey, respondents choose their most preferred concept.
Considerations and best practices for concept testing
Analyzing concept test results
Determining the best performing concept is straightforward in comparison testing and some aspects of protomonadic testing, since respondents choose their preferred concept in their evaluation. But to determine the best performing concepts in monadic and sequential monadic tests (and also to dive deeper into protomonadic tests), you’ll need to compare how the concepts performed across all included attributes. The big question is, how do you get all of your concepts and attributes into one view for easy comparison?
The power of aytm’s Concept Lab
At aytm, our favorite tool for concept test analysis is Concept Lab. Concept Lab allows you to see all concepts and attributes in an easy-to-read, visually- appealing table. You can show all or a subset of concepts in Concept Lab and even rank concepts by the attribute that’s most important. You can also run significance testing to determine best performing concepts at one glance using pairwise comparison or indexing methodologies. It’s a flexible, yet incredibly powerful tool!
Want to check out Concept Lab?
Concept testing is made easy with Xpert Solutions, our flexible, guided research tests developed by research experts utilizing proven best practices. The best part is that each automated Xpert report for concept testing comes with a Concept Lab output with all of your concepts and attributes included. Check out Xpert Solutions Concept Test options here.
NEW!—Concept Lab is now available in Data Lab. With this release, you can add Concept Lab to any aytm survey report and our platform will automatically recognize your concepts and pre-populate them into groups. Check out Concept Lab in Data Lab here.
View the on-demand recording of our recent Spotlight: A deep dive into Concept Lab broadcast:
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