SELLING BLUE ELEPHANTS

Marketing researchers Moskowitz and Gofman (both of whom are also experienced in the the field of experimental psychology) offer a seven-step plan to identify and develop successful products.

Focus groups and the trial-and-error method are flawed approaches to shaping your product for the market, say the authors. Instead, they suggest the application of rule developing experimentation (RDE), a disciplined, expedient process designed to optimize the appeal of a product to the market. Already put to gainful use by such companies as Hewlett-Packard and MasterCard, RDE's aim is to discover what the customer wants in a product, even if they can't specifically articulate the desire or need. It is not a simple process?you have to understand and cogently present all the features of your product that consumers will want to know about, for example?but it does provide an elegant, concise template that explains how to create prototypes to generate samples (frequently tested through the web), then taps into software applications and simple statistical formulas to measure responses, discern patterns and estimate the contribution of each feature. This is not a mass-market approach; it looks to arrive at a superb product for a select target population, though multiple audiences can be addressed through varying your approach.

Systematic, intelligently inquisitive and precise, RDE's objective is to eliminate guesswork in the process of reading the minds of consumers.