How can you align your market testing with your product strategy?

Here is where Business Marketing and Marketing Insights team bring different contribution; Business Marketing clarify the business need as a part of the brief and what is that need probing (consumer or shopper insights, proposition, communication, media mix between others) while Marketing Insights has the expertise to choose how to drive agency / tools to achieve the answers needed.

Top 3 tips: 1. Know Your Target: What it means: Before you start testing, figure out who your product is for. How to do it: Look at your product strategy and see who you designed it for. Make sure your market testing focuses on reaching those exact people. 2. Test Like Your Customer Uses It: What it means: Put it in the real world, where your customers will actually use it. How to do it: If your product is for moms on the go, test it out in their everyday lives. 3. Listen Like a Detective: What it means: When you're testing, look for clues on what's working and what needs fixing. How to do it: Ask questions, watch how people interact with your product, look for patterns and use those insights to fine-tune your product strategy.

Protocepts, use protocepts. And talk to people who care enough to give you honest feedback. Research methods are a great way to spend your company's budget. Start small and scale your testing efforts. Once you have between 40 and 70 percent of the information and confidence required to launch - make an executive decision. Correlation alert: people who do not risk tend not to drink champagne??

Segmenting your testing audience involves employing advanced analytics, employing methodologies like clustering and regression analysis. Dig deep into customer details like age, interests, and behaviors to pinpoint specific segments. This helps tailor your product to meet the diverse needs of these groups effectively. Leverage this insight to finely calibrate your product-market fit, aligning with the unique requirements of each identified group.

From a business standpoint, iterating product strategy involves a balance between innovation and stability. It requires strategic risk-taking, the ability to pivot based on market dynamics, and a focus on long-term sustainability.

Let's discuss what product strategy is, first Product strategy is a set of high level problems you want to solve to move closer to your vision. Although these problems have undergone a very rigorous scrutiny (competitive context, how important are these problems to solve, what gives us the right to solve these problems better & many others) which have a very clear & obvious causal link to your vision but after all they're just hypotheses, very strong ones though. Having said this, it's very difficult to answer this question about market research in the context of product strategy because it's way more nuanced than we'd hope but if we can frame the strategy in the way I've described above, the research question will answer itself.

Optimise customer focus with a minimum of 100 users per segment, ensuring a nuanced understanding of diverse needs. Efficient surveys: Set a two-month timeframe for quick feedback gathering in the fast-paced product development landscape. Swift A/B Testing: Accelerate learning by promptly implementing A/B testing post-iterations for quick validation and refinement. Open-Ended Questions: Foster rich feedback through open-ended questions, encouraging users to share nuanced perspectives. Caution on Iterations: Balance is key; focus on meaningful improvements without excessive pivoting to avoid undermining the initial product strategy. Integrating these boosts your customer development strategy & also helps with product strategy as well.