Concept Testing

A high tech company wanted to explore the scope of the concept for online coaching classes for entrance examinations. The company has past experience in coaching students’ offline but wanted to venture in the new concept of online coaching.

The challenges…

o To test the perception and acceptance of the concept.
o To understand the technological challenges.
o To estimate the market size for the concept.
o Competition mapping.
o To help identify the potential customer segments.
o To eliminate poor concept attributes.

Our approach…

Focus group discussions were conducted with participants meeting specific age, income level and computer ownership requirements as well as certain behaviors/practices related to this new service. Participants discussed which features they considered valuable, what procedures they preferred, as well as what fees would be considered reasonable for such a service.

Interviews were conducted with both students and parents to get their insights for the concept:

o To identify key decision makers.
o To get their feedback on the concepts.
o To gauge their intention on availing the services.

Outcome:

As a result of the group discussions and Interviews, we were able to determine the following facts and guide our client:
o We identified a key need of the prospective customers before they tried out the new concept.

o We suggested our client to provide fulfill this need to convert the prospects desire into action in the AIDA “Awareness – Interest- Desire – Action” sequence.

o We estimated market size for the new concept to help the client decide next course of action.

o We were able to suggest an alternative positioning for our client based on our insights from the research.

o A new segment was suggested to the clients, leading to creation of a new product for this segment.