10 reasons Pretotyping should be added to your consumer insights

In a world where we can get unlimited insights from multiple sources, the current consumer insights process doesn’t take advantage of this, it sources its data primarily through a few processes. This will limit the quality of the consumer insights team's data-based decision-making. Without all the relevant pieces of data, the decisions can’t be formed.

It also restricts how consumer-centric your products can be. Without gathering tangible and reliable data from them, you can’t create products that fit their needs. 

This is where Pretotyping, fake door tests or landing page tests come into play. Overall they offer a fast and cost-effective way to gain consumer insights at scale that:

• Don’t have any bias
• Are led by real behaviour
• Provide a deeper understanding of the consumer

Let’s go into deeper detail about the benefits of Pretotyping for consumer insights.

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1. Pretotyping gives you behavioural data

Current consumer insights methodologies are great at getting qualitative data from respondents, but this data has a flaw. It is biassed toward that specific person, time and thoughts. After all, if you asked me whether I’d buy a new sunscreen that had Niacinamide in it today, I would answer yes to that. Skip ahead 4 months when the product is launched, it’s coming up to winter and the weather has changed, the product is twice the price of normal sun-screen, I don’t think I would buy it.

This is all hearsay based on my current situation and not me putting skin-in-the-game. I don’t have any cons to saying yes.

That’s where Pretotyping differs. As far as the consumer is concerned, the product being tested is perceived as real and they are giving their personal details to ‘buy’ it or get access to it.

This means that the validation you get from these ‘purchases’ are all based on direct and real actions they are taking. This gives you highly valuable behavioural data that can help you more accurately predict demand for this product.

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2. Pretotyping validates your qualitative consumer insights data

Because of the amazing behavioural data that Pretotyping gathers, you might be tempted to question the worth of your qualitative data. But you don’t need to, because Pretotyping goes hand in hand with your current consumer insights process.

How Pretotyping works to gather insights is such that while it can be used on its own, it gets a better direction and gives you a more accurate picture of your consumer when paired with the traditional consumer insights methods.

This is to say that it will verify or upgrade your initial findings with its quantitative data.

3. Pretotyping is cost-effective

It’s new and gives you a lot of valuable and insightful data that you can’t get any other way. Typically when you hear a new process or tool described like that, you should be prepared for a big investment either in money or time.

However, Pretotyping is an extremely cost-effective and resource-light process that can be added into your current processes without much extra work.

At its essence, all you need are some adverts, a few landing pages and something to connect them all together to gather the data. It’s not a long and arduous set up process and in some cases can be done in as a little as a day.

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4. Pretotyping allows you to test all major aspects of a product

One of the greatest challenges we face with gathering consumer insights is the ability to test multiple aspects of a product in quick succession, meaning we can’t accurately tell what features, price points or brands would be the best fit for this.

With Pretotyping, you can quickly and easily set up your tests in a way that allows you to not only test different aspects of your product like features, pricing, branding, target group and value propositions, but you can also test different variants within those tests.

For example, one user tested 6 different prices for their product and found an uplift in demand for a higher price than they had originally hypothesised. Showing the power of Pretotyping in testing variants and aspects of your product.

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5. Pretotyping is fast insights

Running regular consumer insights for new or existing products is time-consuming and expensive. You need to set up multiple tests, find the right questions and audience, and then plan the time to collect the data and review it.

With Pretotyping, the time-to-test is incredibly short and the cost of setting up and running a test is low as mentioned above. This allows you to more easily run tests and gather consumer insights on a continuous basis.

The use of this is that you can keep optimising a product before building it, as well as after. Maybe you want to test a new colour of product because the production costs or time is lower, you can get data for the demand and success of that version of the product in a little over a week, allowing you to innovate faster.

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6. Pretotyping gives your tangible consumer data

How consumer insights are gathered with Pretotyping allows it to deliver a more tangible quantitative data set as opposed to your traditional qualitative and bias-driven data.

The benefits of this mean that you can more accurately predict the success of a new product as defined by your hypothesis. It helps build stronger business cases as the data provided has no bias, it is true to ‘real-world’ demand.

7. Pretotyping lets you test a product before its development

The typical product development process is to create a concept, undertake consumer insights research and then build a prototype, MVP or sample to run final tests against.

This is a fine way to build new products, however, it is long, potentially expensive, and risky. If that product then fails like 38% of new products do (read on to find out why), then you have a large failure on your hands.

With Pretotyping, you can develop the visuals of the product before creating any prototype, MVP or sample that you can test as if that product was live and in the market. This gives you a window into the future to see how that product is received, and which features or branding most resonate with the consumers. Saving you a lot of time and money on prototyping.

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8. Pretotyping helps you create more accurate forecasting 

Apart from the obvious benefits of Pretotyping allowing you to accurately predict the demand for a product, it also helps you to understand the commercial viability of that product so you can accurately forecast its potential.

It does this through the data it collects and the insights it gives you. You can track a respondent through the entire flow, from how many people saw your ad, to the click-through rate and all the way down to the cost-per-conversion.

By understanding the conversion rate at each stage of the transaction and how much spending there has been to convert them, you can quickly and accurately forecast the total cost for launching this product.

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9. Pretotyping has the highest quality of stimulus in market research

With current concept testing processes, the stimulus given to respondents is fairly vague and relies on the respondent to visualise a product that doesn’t exist on their own. This only feeds the bias of how they think that product would look and work and how they would then respond to that.

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Take this example, it tells you what it is without really telling you what it is.

With Pretotyping on the other hand, you can show people exactly what the product is, its benefits and how it would work and look on the landing page. This helps users understand what they are really ‘buying’ by showing them something that looks like it is already on the market.

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10. 38% of new products fail because of unmet consumer needs

Unfortunately, it’s true, even with current consumer insights processes a large margin of products don’t succeed. 

With Pretotyping you can more accurately test how the product will be received by consumers and in what configuration will work best. Making sure you don’t lose time and money by focusing on developing a business case and product that won’t succeed in the end.