Learning with a subsection of research methodologies

With concept testing surveys, you can display concepts or claims to customers to determine your best options for marketing messaging, branding, and product decisions. Stop the guessing game and make quick, effortless, data-driven decisions.

💡 This article covers

• What is concept testing?
• Research designs of concept testing methodologies
  • Independent
  • Monadic
  • Protomonadic
  • Paired-Comparison
  • Repeated Measures
  • Sequential Monadic

What is concept testing?

Concept testing is enabled by Segmanta's variant question setting.

• Click here to learn how to create variants.

💪 When to use it 

• Product launch
  Let your future customers help you decide between different variations of your upcoming product by displaying a random rotation of designs or claims and see which ones perform best, using Segmanta’s A/B testing functionality
  
• Pre-campaign
  Get an early sense of how your target audience will respond to advertisements or marketing claims before finalizing a campaign, to discover insights on Segmanta’s automated Analytics Results Dashboard to make quick but informed decisions
• A/B test
  Run a quick poll to decide between two versions of your branding or product design, by embedding images or video within your Segmanta survey to present your concepts to respondents in an engaging way

Research designs of concept testing methodologies

💪 When to use it

• Users can randomly assign respondents to a single concept using the variant feature
• Utilize variant questions in order to test claims, advertisements, images and more
• Researchers can use Segmanta's Concept Testing Template evaluate a concept and analyze how it will be received by consumers before it goes to market.

💼 What it does

• Perform concept testing methodologies based on the type of results you are looking for and what you are aiming to test. Segmanta offers six research designs. Below, we explore each design in depth.
  
  

Expose your concepts to a variety of research designs. Click into each one to explore their role.

Independent Measures

💪 When to use it

• Recruit multiple groups to test your concepts and rate concepts

💼 What it does

• Independent Measures is a type of research design where multiple groups of people are recruited to test either concepts or products. Each group is asked to test and rate the concept that they were shown. Different concepts are displayed to each group.
  
  Pros of Independent Measures
  • Eliminates order effects (occurs when subject participants act a certain way due to elements such as restlessness or exhaustion or learning the order of the experiment) as the subjects are only testing one condition. This means that the objective of the experiment is less evident to the subject.
  • Multiple conditions can be run simultaneously.
  • Demand characteristics (occurs when participants form an interpretation of the test's purpose and unconsciously change their behavior to fit that interpretation) is less likely to develop throughout the experiment as participants will be less likely to predict the objective of the experiment.

Cons of Independent Measures

• • Requires many participants to perform the experiment to reduce inconsistency in the results and reach an accurate conclusion. Therefore, this research design tends to be more expensive.

  • Difficult to determine which concept respondents like best, as each group tests a different product.

Monadic

The most commonly used research design, Monadic is a type of experiment where:

• You can expose a single concept to your respondents.
• Respondents evaluate the concept.
• Researchers collect responses and analyze the results to determine which concept attained the best results.

Protomonadic

💪 When to use it 

• Subjects are asked to contrast the two tested products/concepts. It can be also be referred to as Sequential Single Product or Concept Testing.

It is a type of experiment where...

• • A subject is given a concept to test and evaluate it.

  • Immediately after their evaluation, the subject is given a second concept to assess and evaluate.

How does this research design vary from Paired-Comparison testing?

• • With Protomonadic testing, subjects are asked to provide an evaluation of the first product before evaluating the second product.

  • With Paired-Comparison testing, subjects are asked to test two products. Only after they have tested the two products are the subjects asked to contrast the two.

Paired-Comparison

💪 When to use it 

• Subject test two or more concepts to specify or determine the better or more preferred concept.

Paired-Comparison research design...

• • Allows subject to contrast the finer details between the two concepts

  • Tends to be an inexpensive experimental technique as sample sizes can be smaller

  • Is heavily influenced by the consumer. As a result, it can cause “interaction effect”, which means that any differences in the first product (known as the control) will create a correlating variance in the test concept's scores.

Repeated Measures

💪 When to use it

• Test one group multiple concepts back-to-back.

It is a type of experiment where...

• • One group of the same subjects tests multiple concepts

  • The subjects can test the concepts back-to-back, or at different points in time

  • Subjects are asked to rank the products

  • Subjects are exposed to all of the treatment conditions

Pros of Repeated Measures

• • Requires a smaller number of participants. Therefore, this research technique tends to cost less because the same subjects test other products in the experiment.

  • Requires less time for participants to test concepts. Therefore, it is not likely that individual differences will influence the collected data.

  • More likely remove a participants individual differences as subjects are exposed to all treatments. Therefore, this design tends to yield powerful results.

Cons of Repeated Measures

• • Order effect can potentially occur due to subjects having experience testing out previous products.

  • Because it is a longitudinal study in its nature, it is likely that demand characteristics will occur as the participants had more time to predict the experiment's objective.

Sequential Monadic

💪 When to use it

• Target an audience or subset sample with 2 concepts shown.

It is a type of experiments where...

• • Researchers show their entire target audience or a subset sample either all concepts or a fraction of them — with at least 2 concepts being shown at random

  • Each concept receives the same set of follow-up questions 

  • To determine the winning concept, compare each of their results