By: Ashley Campbell
Director, Product Sales
With market competition increasing rapidly, brands face pressure to get the right products into the hands of consumers faster. This requires a greater and more granular understanding of the holistic customer journey, from interest to purchase, combining data from surveys and extensive research and development to ensure that those products meet the needs and preferences of their target consumers. But what if you could better combine rich survey data and real-world consumer feedback to more accurately predict which products will be most attractive to your target customer?
Dynata partnered with AR/VR product innovator Gorilla in the room to launch a pioneering solution for product development that uses Augmented Reality and Physiometric™ data to help brands better understand consumer choice, and in turn, unlock more successful product development strategies.
According to Gorilla in the room’s Cognitive Scientist, Dr. Alastair Goode, a major challenge of product research is the Say-Do gap because consumers don’t always do what they say they will. Additionally, brands struggle to create and share realistic product prototypes, preventing accurate measurement of natural consumer behaviour and choice in a real-world context; for example, 2D images and 3D versions of products on flat computer screens are commonly used, but these aren’t realistic representations of how consumers will see products in the real world. And while physical prototypes are sometimes leveraged, they are costly and time-consuming to produce, and lack the quantitative data necessary for brands to make confident product decisions. All of which contributes to the commonly-held belief, true or not, that an overwhelming percentage of new product launches fail – estimates as high as 90%!
Working together, Dynata and Gorilla in the room sought to improve the product research and development process. By combining Dynata’s online quantitative survey solution with Gorilla in the room’s Product Innovation Platform, we created a new product development (NPD) consumer research study leveraging Physiometric™ data to measure real-world human behaviour.
The Research:
To bring this to life, three AR coffee machines were created using Gorilla in the room’s Product Innovation Platform. Then, leveraging Dynata’s first-party data set of more than 62 million consumers and business professionals, we recruited 100 consumer respondents from the UK. These respondents were presented the three coffee machines and given the opportunity to explore each product in their home using Augmented Reality, viewing them from different angles and investigating their unique features. Alongside this experience, we launched a traditional product research survey questionnaire to compare feedback on the three options and measure the results, looking to better understand which of the coffee machines these consumers would be most likely to buy.
The Results:
Responses from the traditional survey questionnaire showed no preference between the coffee machines, with similar scores across the three variants. If a brand used this approach, with the aim of a selecting which product to launch, the research would have been inconclusive. Physiometric™ technology analyses real-time behaviour with AR versions of products to deliver new data insight on observed and objective behaviour.
The Physiometric™ data, however, delivered richer, more granular insights that leveraged:
1. Behavioural data enabling a more comprehensive diagnosis on why a consumer made a particular decision about a machine
2. Physiometric™ data demonstrating that respondents behaved differently towards the machines they accepted versus those they rejected
Our interpretation of complex Physiometric™ data sets also identified several valuable metrics to help inform product development decisions:
1. Interest (attention and consideration given to products) showing that respondents were significantly more interested in the red coffee machine compared to the yellow or white options;
2. Engagement (levels of motivation and involvement with the product) was higher among the red and white coffee machines compared to the yellow machine;
3. Exploration (magnitude and level of investigation of product) highlighting that respondents explored the red coffee machine significantly more than the other two.
By integrating Gorilla in the room’s AR solution into Dynata’s quantitative surveys to generate Physiometric™ data, it was possible to better understand consumer choice and the motivation behind it and more accurately predict which products respondents would select. This effectively closes the gaps between product development and consumer choice to ensure that the right product, with the most attractive features, is presented to target customers at the point when they are ready to buy.
To learn more about how your brand can collect Physiometric™ data to interpret real-time consumer behaviour and predict consumer preferences, check out the video below and contact Dynata for more information.