Product marketers and managers make the best decisions when they have consistent access to data and insights on their products and markets. Our experience has taught us the two most important components of ensuring your insights and market intelligence program is effective:
1) integrate custom research as you need it to fill in the gaps left behind by general industry research reports
2) ensure your team has ready access to reports and data to reference it at the point of decision
We have recently embarked on a quarter-long series of blog articles aimed at illustrating how this works through a concrete medical device example. Last week we discussed the market assessment; this week we are sharing a conjoint study. For our article this week, we are not going into detail regarding the conjoint methodology, but if you would like to read more about our use of ACBC, click here to learn more. We’ll wait for you.
A Conjoint-Based Concept Test for a Medical Device
Our use case is a medical device for orthopedic surgery, which includes a capital equipment component and a consumable component. Actionable Research developed both the survey used to screen and understand respondents as well as the conjoint exercise itself. The study was conducted blind, meaning we did not disclose the sponsor of the study. Conducting a blind study encourages honest responses and helps to remove potential biases.
Because there were several features that were proposed as enhancements to the first generation of the platform (including specialized “modes” and settings for different surgery and tissue types) our experience with ACBC conjoint was essential to getting a quality design that would yield workable answers for engineering and marketing decisions. All together there were 40 attribute levels spanning 12 attribute categories, which allowed for a robust set of choices without overwhelming the respondent.
Following the development of the survey and its validation internally, the survey and ACBC exercises were programmed and tested among a small group of orthopedic surgeons for validation externally prior to launch. The survey was fielded in the US and big 5 EU countries (FR, DE, IT, ES and UK), and the data was analyzed to determine the optimal configurations per geography, surgical case sub-specialty (i.e., knee vs shoulder, etc.), and case volume. The results yielded several important findings:
- The new feature sets were very popular;
- The company was viewed as a leader in their marketplace
- The product was able to command a higher price than the old configuration (but more on that in our next blog!)
Insight Streamer Lifecycle – Combined Data for Expanded Insights
Following the completion of reporting, it was time to add the data to the Lifecycle database and include the reporting in EverStream reporter. Through EverStream, company marketing and product development team members have access to both reports side by side (market assessment and ACBC reporting) and can also perform ad hoc analysis of the data from both surveys combined. This enables the use respondent profiles identified in the second survey to extend the insights gathered in the first market assessment survey, as well as consider potential inferences that existed between the product adopters in the ACBC study and market assessment respondents. Here, it is determined there are certain profiles of respondents who seem like they may be more likely to prefer the new product over the existing product, a potential segment of their audience which would make fertile ground for planting seeds about what is coming in the market.
The use of conjoint and ACBC in particular offer deep insights into our customer’s markets, and the results become more impactful when reported through EverStream and now in Insight Streamer Lifecycle. Our data set and report pool is growing!
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