Here’s the problem: Every one of those people in the cartoon above is right (except legal – hopefully). No one wants their new products to fail. Failure costs time, money, lost sales and lost market share. Unfortunately, it doesn’t take much for a product to fail. What we know is this: how the pieces fit together is often more important than the strength or weakness of any one piece.
The beauty of Building Blockssm is its ability to address multiple issues simultaneously so that key relationships between variables are uncovered. The entire client team participates in the informal interviewing to maximize understanding and to achieve fantastic team alignment.
Imagine a print advertisement for a new product. The ad will certainly contain a headline, a major reason for using the product, a picture of the product, and, in a prominent position, the product's name.
Imagine that there are:
• | three headlines suggested by the copy development team |
• | four viable benefits from a previous concept test |
• | four images projected by the artist's rendering of the graphics and background |
• | three names that have come out of focus groups |
These four items can be combined in one hundred and forty-four different ways!
And this doesn't begin to address the mix of ingredients, the predominant color, flavor or texture of the product, pricing or packaging tradeoffs.
A Building Blockssm study allows the consumer to choose the parts of the total product that he or she likes best. The combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis tells you which combinations work well together and should be pursued. Even more importantly, the analysis shows which items and combinations are likely to run into "dead-ends", and should be dropped from future consideration.
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