Testing priced concepts can be an important part of your research pipeline. After refining your concepts, you'll want to make sure the price is well-received by the intended audience. To achieve this, your pricing needs to be communicated properly and at the appropriate stage of testing.
In this article:
Including price
Whether or not you should include price comes down to the aim of your research.
Broadly speaking, the main stages of testing fall under the following objectives:
Prioritization
Optimization
Validation
During prioritization, price is not needed, as the goal of this research is to identify which ideas have a base appeal. For suggestions on how to ask about value in the absence of price, see Testing value for unpriced concepts in this article.
During optimization, these ideas are given more details, and price can be shown optionally as part of the evaluation in cases where the price clarifies the positioning of your offering.
At the validation stage, your fully realized concept should have price information to give the most holistic picture of your innovation's potential for success. It will also allow you to more closely model share of choice, such as with our Market Simulator.
Price placement
Generally, pricing information should go at the end of your description, on its own line, along with any related specs:
If you need to emphasize the price, you can add it to the title area. You may want to emphasize the price in the following cases:
If the prices within your competitive set vary significantly
OR
If the prices are relatively similar, but other product details may make certain concepts better deals than others (e.g. price per serving)
In either of these cases, it's important that a respondent have price information top of mind, as it may greatly impact their interest or willingness to purchase. In an Idea Screen, keeping information in the title will also make it prominent during the trade-off portion of the exercise.
Testing value for unpriced concepts
If you don't have a price on your concept, you can still ask questions about the perceived value of your offering.
In the early stages of testing, you can ask about perceived quality, benefits over existing products, or whether someone finds your innovation worth paying more for, relative to what's currently available. You can also probe for perceptions of premium vs. value. All of this information, while non-numeric, will help give a sense of the type of prices consumers would expect, or what category people expect your offering to play in.
Testing prices internationally
If you are testing in multiple countries, ensure your translations also reflect the local pricing and currency.
Note that in Upsiide, a study can only have one set of information per language and therefore one price per language. For example, if you were testing the same concept in Brazil and Portugal, you could not (within the same study and exercise) show one price/currency to Portuguese respondents and a different price/currency to Brazilian respondents, because Portuguese would be common to both countries. Similarly, if you have different prices within a country depending on region, you couldn't show different prices depending on the region in which someone is located.
In cases where you would need to do this, we recommend using separate studies so that you can change the price to the country or region.
Pricing exercises
If you need to go beyond testing an already-priced concept, you may want to use a pricing exercise to arrive at the best price for your innovation. If you're looking to do a Gabor Granger in Upsiide, see here for an outline of the steps to set one up. If you're looking to do another type of pricing exercise, you can reach out to your CSM for guidance.