The ultimate guide to concept testing

Eric Van Susteren
Content Strategist

Table of contents
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Let that statistic sink in for a moment. Think of all the money spent on research, development, marketing, sales, promotional events, and everything else you can imagine for a product that consumers didn’t actually need or want to buy. You wasted all that time and money that could have been spent on something that would get a much better return on investment.

It’s a scary thought, but think about it from another perspective.

Think of all the ideas you’ve had that never got to see the light of day. Maybe you weren’t confident enough in them, maybe your boss didn’t like them, or maybe you simply didn’t have enough proof that they would be successful.

Here’s another, perhaps more informal, data point that most people attribute to Wayne Gretzky, some to Michael Jordan, and fewer still to Michael Scott.

You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.

But Wayne didn’t take just any old shot. By the time the puck left his stick, he had a pretty good idea of whether it was going to score. That’s because his shots were calculated; they were honed; they were tested.

In the business world, you might not be able to get (or afford) enough shots on goal to develop a sixth sense the way he did. But that’s what concept testing is for.

Concept testing is the process of evaluating a concept (like a product or an ad campaign) and how it will be received by consumers before it goes to market. While various concept testing methods exist, we’re going to talk about the most common technique: using surveys.

Concept testing neatly addresses both of the issues we’ve presented above. It helps you:

The bottom line is that implementing a professional, well-developed concept testing system will save you money.

We’ll teach you how to create and run your own concept testing program, from point A to point Z. We’ll even give you examples to follow along the way.

Throughout this guide, we’ll show you examples of concept tests we created for a fictional pet food company to choose a name, logo, and ads. The results you’ll see are real feedback from a global panel of respondents on SurveyMonkey Audience, our always-on market research solution.

The methods we’re going to use for this guide can be applied to a lot of other use cases like product development, package testing and messaging. But in this article, we’ll be focusing on three main use cases: name testing, logo testing, and ad testing.

As you learn about the ins and outs of concept testing in this guide, you can follow along and use the surveys we created as examples for how to run your own. Before we begin, it’s worth mentioning that SurveyMonkey has a suite of expert solutions that can make the process of building and analyzing a concept testing survey a lot easier, providing you with fast, reliable results from your target audience without doing a lot of the legwork.

Here’s the beauty of the concept testing principles you’ll learn in this guide: You can use them for many purposes at virtually any point of your project’s timeline. All you need is a little focus.