NPD Market Attraction Tool

Click here for free tools and know-how materials from the Mud Valley™ strategy & brand marketing community.

Question - Is there a quick standard way of assessing whether a new product will be attractive to the market?

Answer - This is one of the quick assessment tools we like the best, and we have also incorporated it into our Business Standout tool which assesses your overall attraction to the market

Key points

This New/Existing Product Assessment tool can be used to assess the prospects of a new product / service you have developed (that is its background, and where it has been tested and proven predictive over many years), but it can also be applied as a diagnostic to check the freshness of your existing range of products / services. Do they still "cut the mustard?"

In more detail….

This tool simply asks four questions:

1. Is it significantly differentiated from, and thereby better than, alternative solutions? This need not be a product / service differentiation in itself. It could be a differentiation lent by the brand or the supply chain

2. Do potential customers like it? While you can test this scientifically, gut feel can often work at least as well. Do your potential customers light up when you first introduce the idea?

3. Does it solve an actual problem? Many products / services are brilliantly-conceived solutions to a problem the customer either does not have at all, or does not care about

4. Can potential customers afford it? This can be an absolute - do they have the money to afford it? - or relative - can they justify paying more for this than for viable alternatives?

We recommend that you start out by analysing a segment of your potential customers, not the whole lot. If you find that you get the same answers each time, you can aggregate up to a higher level of abstraction.

This tool can be bought separately here.

It also makes up part of our broader “Innovation” training e-package which comprises an e-booklet and nine of our new product / service development tools. To find out more, please click here.

© 2007, Mud Valley ™ brand marketing community.

Related answers