How Market Research Helps in Each Stage of New Product Development

Market research is everything.

Be it new product development or promoting an existing product, market research is the backbone and irreplaceable component. An intense market research adds competitve strengths to new product development strategies. After it is launched, the product can easily sail through the market competition, when market research is done perfectly.

An important statistic by McKinsey Global Institute here you have to note is about product failure. The estimated rate of product failure ranges between 25% and 45%, where the consumer goods industry has the higher percentage.

Can you guess why there is a higher percentage of product failure?

Yup, right! They probably might have ignored conducting solid market research for developing new products. But you should never ignore it ever!

Well, market research for new product development is a complex and detailed procedure. Let this blog help you explain everything about market research and new product development. Here, we will check each stage of product development with the help of comprehensive market research in detail.

So, let's get it started!

Market research basically verifies the worthiness of your new product idea. It's more like a reality check that you need before launching your products. Also, it keeps an eye on competitors to check what they are doing with their existing products.

For example, you're probably checking online reviews of your competitors to see what customers are asking of them. Maybe you're going to put these customer queries for consideration when you develop your products. Isn't it? If so, then you're probably doing market research.

Market research is all about listening to what is happening in the market. Based on the findings, you need to identify the gap and try to fill the gap through your products. However, market research is something beyond just finding and filling the gaps. It helps;

Besides product development, market research also helps find the right market to place your products. Also, you can streamline your sales and after-sales operations when you get the right ideas.

Market research is a comprehensive topic, and it spreads across multiple domains. A variety of methods are there to perform the marketing tactics and get the best out of it. But first, you need to choose what type of market research you're looking for to develop your products. Some of the following options you can have;

Quantitative market research focuses on things that you can measure. In this case, the data is regarding the people you want to target for your new products. It includes;

With all this information, you can recommend your products to them and niche down your marketing strategies further.

Opposite of quantitative, qualitative measures the factors that you cannot count. It includes information like motives, preferences, likability of the products, etc. These values cannot be expressed in exact terms or numbers, but they immensely help you set your products to the market. With the help of the right marketing strategies, you can collect and utilize the data into your product development operations.

Development of a new product is more like a journey that comprises with various processes. Mainly, we will discover the seven vital stage of product development journey through this section. Let's break each of them to you here.

Generating new product ideas is more like a brainstorming session. It works from scratch and comprises different elements like product discovery, proposal, journey mapping, etc. It directly lands up into digging up more to find what exactly the problem customer is facing. And hence, the scope for a product can be drawn for that.

Picking up ideas from a bunch of ideas is the main work of idea screening. Deciding what ideas to pick and what to discard is getting screened through this. Idea screening helps to filter out the unnecessary elements, improves product quality, and checks the technical feasibility of the products.

An idea that passes through the screening phase now enters the concept development phase. In this phase, you will get the blueprint of the product that you are targeting. Concept development covers these three things;

Analyze the value of your marketing strategy to finalize the product. At this stage, you have to finalize the product strategy and complete the product development phase. Once you finalize the marketing strategy, you can start developing your products, which comes in the next section.

This phase is similar to mimicking the actual products, but you need to create prototypes for this. You can use low-fidelity wireframes to create product prototypes and test them on a real audience to get real insights. Many companies take the help of UX tools at this stage to develop their products in original version.

There is a common testing ground available in the market that says A/B testing. It comprises two concepts: alpha and beta testing. In alpha testing, software testers will check products to identify and fix bugs before releasing the products to the public. In beta testing, the product will be delivered to the actual users to collect feedback.

In both cases, whatever issues come out as outcomes will be fixed immediately. The goal here is to make the product reach launching ground without any issue.

Ultimately, at this stage, the product gets released for the mass. Now, the marketing team will frame strategies to promote the products and sell them through various funnels. As the product fills the market gap, the value proportion will be added at this stage.

From the first stage to the last, market research helps develop a product comprehensively. Marketing research is a wide concept, and you need some solid direction here. For that, you can always hire a professional market research data entry service provider to help you with all the data.