Pitfalls of New Product Development Research

Danielle Rodgers of Small Business Branding posted an interesting and thoughtful commentary about the potential benefits and pitfalls of using marketing research to make decisions in the new product development process. Her observations, which she follows up on with detailed explanations and suggested countermoves (so you should read her article) are as follows:

• Very few people will really understand the vision of your product when you describe it to them.
• If you ask people to find a problem they will (even if they never would have noticed it in real life)
• Talk is cheap — people don’t always (often? ever?) do what they say are are going to do (such as buy your product).
• Sometimes respondents don’t answer for themselves, but instead try to guess what the market is thinking.
• People don’t always have words to describe what they really want or need.
• Some people may have strong negative reactions to specific elements of your product.
• Just because one type of person doesn’t like your product doesn’t mean that others won’t.

Read Danielle’s full article at Small Business Branding.