Automated Webinar Transcript

 Emily Brownell Sutton: Hey there, and thank you for joining us for Highlight Spark. We hope it's been a fruitful learning experience so far. And don't worry, we've got a lot more great stuff to share with you. A quick housekeeping note, feel free to use the chat throughout the session, but if you have a question you'd like answered, uh, be sure to drop it in the q and a.

After the event, we'll compile everyone's questions and send out answers. In this next session, we'll dive into a demo of the Highlight platform for a common use case. We see more and more customers taking advantage of concept testing. You'll see how Highlight customers can use concept testing to deeply and specifically understand consumer preferences before investing a single cent in physical product development.

But before we get started, let me introduce myself and my fellow speakers. My name is Emily Sutton and I'm a senior product manager and former researcher myself. Here at Highlight. Soon you'll hear from my colleague Andrew Shin, who manages our product tester community experiences. And finally, you'll meet Christopher Ridley, who's in charge of all things data and insights and our platform.

Let's start with some context. Highlight is the only purpose-built product intelligence platform. More and more brands are using Highlight as a holistic research solution for product success, and we're continuing to invest in evolving our offering to serve our customers' needs. As more brands move away from the old stage gate model for product development and adopt more agile product innovation and renovation practices, more and more of them are using Highlight to conduct research iteratively throughout the product lifecycle.

That's why today you're gonna see a sneak peek of the Highlight platform's latest update concept testing beginning at the end of the month. All Highlight customers will be able to run their own concept tests and our product intelligence platform. We are so excited to be able to make it easier than ever.

To get the digital testing you need to deepen and complement the research our customers are already doing for physical products. What is concept testing? Concept testing is a specific and frequently used form of digital testing, which is any type of testing that doesn't involve people experiencing a physical product.

Digital testing is always important for a few reasons. It helps you know where to begin to get a pulse on your consumer sets and explore unmet needs and category white space opportunities. This is also crucial for mitigating risk. If you're jumping straight to prototyping without any consumer feedback, you could be wasting a tremendous amount of time, money, and effort.

Concept testing specifically is crucial for refining ideas, helping to identify winners and ditch those that don't do well. This third bucket is where we see more and more Highlight customers, specifically benefiting from digital testing, and that's when it's conducted in phases followed by physical product testing.

When you're asking survey questions during concept testing, like, would you purchase this item for 3 99? And then following up with the same question after they've experienced the physical product in the organic environment of their own homes, you can assess whether you've nailed product concept fit, and unlock a leading indicator of future product performance from multiple perspectives.

Digital testing is always an important component to holistic research, but it's especially important in a macro environment like today's where we are all facing even more uncertainty than usual. Okay. Digital testing helps you look before you leap. It helps you get precise with your product development, and it introduces as much confidence as possible to a process that's already inherently risky and feels a bit riskier than usual these days.

So let's see how a sample concept test might play out in real life with the Highlight platform. Meet Dave. He's the director of R&D at a beverage brand called Better Bevvies, and he's come to Highlight with a big question. He's got three potential designs for the newest flavor of gut healthy probiotic soda, Shirley Temple. But he has no idea which one is gonna appeal more to his consumer set. So let's jump over to Highlight to see how Dave would set up his concept test. To get the answers he needs to proceed with confidence. Dave's project is pre-configured for the concept test solution, and the first thing he'll do is upload his package designs or stimuli for survey takers to respond to.

Here Dave can enter a name for each concept and he can enter an additional blinded name so that all respondents see are concept A, concept B, and concept C, but it's still clear to him and other members of his team, which is which. Once Dave has uploaded his three concepts, he can view the thumbnail or click on the thumbnail to view the expanded image, to double check that he's uploaded all three concepts and hasn't accidentally uploaded two of the same or the wrong file altogether.

Another useful feature on this step is a link to the Highlight knowledge base that provides best practices and guidance for creating a rigorous research grade stimuli. Now that his concepts are uploaded and named, it's time to build his audience, and for that I'll pass the baton to Andrew Shin. Hi everyone.

Andrew Shin: So when building your audience for a concept test, we've designed the user flow to be as simple and streamlined as possible. Each respondent will see one concept and we'll make sure that each concept has equal exposure. This structure ensures you can make an apples to apples comparison if your results to see which concept performed best at the end of your study.

So for this example, let's say we want a hundred responses per concept. That means 300 respondents overall. Once you define audience size, it's time to customize your audience. This is your chance to add any qualifying criteria for your audience of respondents. So in Dave's example, he knows his core audience is women between the ages of 25 and 55, and he knows they plan to distribute this new Shirley Temple flavor at key retailers only.

So he is going to further define his audience as shoppers at Kroger, but Dave has another thought. While historically their customer base is mostly female, he's wondering how this new flavor might perform with men. So he is going to add men age 25 to 55 who shop at Kroger to his audience as well, but at a lower proportion of only 20%.

We'll therefore update the women quota to 80%. And that's just a small preview of all of the qualifying criteria Dave has to choose from Highlights, community of testers, answer 46 profile questions when joining our community, which provides a rich foundation of both demographic and behavioral data for Dave to choose from.

We've seen customers build and successfully recruit niche audiences with as low as a 3% incidence rate in the population. For example, recruiting respondents in full term pregnancy to test postpartum supplements. Furthermore, if Dave had conducted past research with this same audience, our software provides customers with an easy way to reuse a previous audience.

Similarly, if Dave later wanted to run an IDI using the same respondents that participated in this concept test, we make that recontacting effort very easy as well. Now of course, we're doing a concept test today with no physical product, but if Dave did have physical prototypes of his Shirley Temple soda cans to test, he would ship his product en mass to the Highlight warehouse where we would repackage and handle any blinding that needs to happen before shipping onto respondents.

Anyway. Now that Dave's audience is built, it's time to create his actual survey. So I'll hand it back to Emily for this part.

Emily: Survey production is much easier and quicker in Highlight thanks to pre-populated modular blueprints. As a default, you'll see the questions that our in-house researchers have recommended for a rigorous concept test.

But you can also make edits to each question, delete questions, drag and drop new questions in all depending on what you wanna know from your respondents. In the case of Dave's concept test, you can see we have a survey for each concept, which are automatically generated and updated based on edits made to the initial stimuli step.

Okay. We also have an easy copy feature. That means you can quickly bring over survey content for each concept, meaning you'll only have to do the hard part of drafting once. This also makes it easy to ensure you'll be able to compare key metrics and results while still giving you the freedom to ask specific questions by concept in case there's a specific element about one or the other that you wanna drill down into.

You'll also notice that the concept images or stimuli that Dave uploaded earlier are automatically included in the questions. You can click this full size image button to validate you've uploaded the correct image, and note that this is also the same functionality and view that survey respondents will see so that they can get a full view of the concept.

Once your survey draft is ready to go, you can preview the view Highlight respondents will see for a final proofread, and then move your survey from draft to ready. Now all that's left for Dave to do is submit his project and wait for results to start rolling in. And for that I'll hand it over to Christopher Ridley.

Christopher Ridley: Thanks, Emily and Andrew, let's jump into the most exciting part of any research project, concept test or otherwise, and that's live results and insights. As soon as respondents start taking Dave's concept test and submitting results, you can see the answers come in for each question in the Explorer tab.

Within these charts, you can use segments to dig deeper. For example, if you wanna see how millennial women versus Gen Z women are responding to certain questions, you can apply those segments to your results. This ability to segment by demographic or psychographic criteria enables you to dig really deep.

Even with a shorter survey. Another cool feature is analyzing any open-ended responses in your survey. In Dave's case, he wanted to include an open-ended question at the end of his survey, inviting any further feedback. In this explore tab, he can quickly view an AI summary of the open-ended responses, filter by keywords, and see what percentage of responses conveyed negative.

Positive or neutral sentiment. After all responses have been collected and Dave has hit his target audience number, automated analytics give Dave the insights he needs to make a confident decision on what concept to proceed with. In Dave's case, he might be especially interested in cross tabs where he can quickly move through the data to identify trends, compare groups, and spot outliers.

Once Dave identifies a winning concept in this phase of digital testing, he's ready to move on to the next phase with in-home usage testing. That way he can measure if the product has lived up to the concept in the eyes of consumers with these kinds of sensory tests, analytics like penalty analysis are super helpful for determining whether the formulation is too sweet.

And how it performs on other key sensory metrics. One final quick tip for this phase testing approach is to include questions measuring purchase intent in both your concept test and your future in-home usage test to get a read on how this product will perform in market. Thanks to this concept test, Dave was able to identify concept A as the winning package design across his key consumer audiences, and now he can proceed to prototyping without wondering if he's made the right decision on which design consumers like the most.

We're happy to answer more questions about concept testing. Whether it's about the specific Highlight approach you saw today, or if you're wondering how to incorporate concept testing into your product development process alongside other key research projects, be sure to leave your questions in the q and a box or visit let's Highlight.com to request a personalized demo and see how you can start infusing your product research roadmap with high quality consumer insights.