Creating a full picture of understanding for a launch of a new product, or to make strategic decisions on an exisiting product line, contiunous insights processes are essential.
They help you to:
- Understand the consumers needs in more detail
- Create more focussed products
- Gather behavioural consumer insights
In this blog we will take you through the ways you can use fake door testing in your consumer insights process to create better products.
What are continuous insights?
Continuous insights in the product development and consumer insights space is a process used to develop better products by understanding the consumers needs in more detail. This gets split into two different variations depending on the product:
If it’s new, then it is a more linear flow to get to a final understanding of the consumers needs and how this product best fits them.
If it’s an existing product line, then this process can help uncover missed opportunities for a product. It may be the case that you should look at increasing the colour range of the product, or add new features, either way, the continuous insights process will help you uncover these opportunities and decide if they are worth pursuing or not.
How fake door testing helps the continuous insights process
The problem with continuous insights, is getting a consistent and fast process to keep gathering this data within a set time period. The execution time for a survey is long and takes a lot of resources to create the survey, find respondents and analyse the data received to tell the story.
Doing this for 5 different test points like brand, features, pricing, target group and value proposition would take too long to test and get insights for an efficient development process.
This is where fake door testing comes into play. It’s fast to setup with minimal resources used and gives you the benefit of easy to read and unbiased behavioural data. Because of this, you can easily run those 5 test points, back to back within 6 weeks and have a solid understanding of the consumers behaviour within each test.
The speed in which you can launch rounds of testing with fake door tests makes it the perfect companion for continuous insights testing.
What is the fake door testing process within continuous insights?
There are many ways you can run fake door tests and it depends on the product and the data you want to collect from it, however within the continuous insights process, it comes down to 2 major pathways.
1. Fake door tests for new products
With a new product, you won’t have any reliable behavioural data to start with, so you need to start the testing process from the beginning to really understand the consumers and how your product fits with their needs.
The way to do this is by running a series of tests to gather insights on each aspect of your product.
A typical flow for this would be:
- Features
You will want to understand what features are consumers most engaged with first as it will great the base for the upcoming tests. - Value proposition
Next you want to understand what value proposition the consumers are most drawn to. After this test you will have the base of what the product should have and how that should be communicated. - Pricing
Now you need to look at pricing for this product mix. Use what you have learned so far to create the ideal product landing page and test up to 6 different prices. - Brand
Brand is up next, trying to find out whether you should launch the brand targeted at a certain group of people or whether you should use a new brand vs. an existing brand. - Target group
Finally, you need to test the target group to help forecast and predict which group would be the most profitable to launch this product to which will help product and advertising decisions later on.
2. Fake door tests for strategic product decisions
If you already have an existing product, but you want to expand the product line, make additions to it’s features or just understand whether there are any opportunities available to optimise the product, you can with fake door testing.
It’s a similar process to a new product, but this time you are starting with data available. This means you might not want to run the product through all of the potential aspects, but instead a select few to gain insights into a specific area of the product.
A few examples of this would be:
Expanding a product line
You may want to look into expanding the product line into a new colour. For this you could run a feature test to test for the new colour as well as a pricing test to make sure that the product is being sold at the optimal price and finally a target group test to see if there is a new group of consumers that react better to the new colour options over the existing consumer group.
Adding additional features
If you have an existing app for instance you might be looking at new features that you want to add. The problem is always prioritising these features, what you believe will be best for the users might not actually be what they are looking for. For this you can use fake door testing to ‘show’ the new features through landing page tests and gain insight into which feature is most in demand.
You can also then run pricing tests to see whether you should be looking to charge an additional fee for access to this feature or not, and how much that additional fee could look like.
Finding opportunities
It is always a good idea to keep testing existing products for potential opportunities. You may find that by running target group tests there is a new group that have a high demand for your product, this could then lead into new features to match that target group or a brand change to better match what they are looking for. You can also find that running pricing tests on a regular basis allow you to see if there is a potential price uplift available for your product, this may also come with a brand change, if you launch the product at a new price under a new brand you could see margins increase.
Overall, fake door testing is a dynamic way to gather consumer insights that allows you to test quickly and easily in multiple facets of your product which makes it perfect for continued use.
Written by
Steven Titchener
An experienced growth marketer now helping Horizon and it's customers create successful products. Always looking to expand his ideas and take on unique and interesting takes on the world of marketing and product development processes.
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