Using Customer Feedback for New Product Research & Introduction

The Challenge:
From well-defined customer trials, determine customer reaction to new product offerings

The Client:
Thousand-unit quick serve restaurant chain

Situation:
This large multi-unit chain had been using Mindshare for many years to gather real-time customer feedback and to improve operations at the store level. With the Mindshare systems ability to make contact with so many of their customers each day, the company's corporate marketing department decided to use it to capture data from customers immediately after they tried several new flavor and product combinations.

Action:
Because flexible design in Mindshare's automated survey technology, it was easy to add a couple of additional "question slots" to the already-existing operations survey. Marketing questions were rotated through these slots, thereby providing the minimal sample size required for the marketing research, without sacrificing the continuous reporting of the operations experience. Reporting was easily changed to include results in existing reports and also in specially-created reports just for this project.

The Marketing Research survey components consisted of at least four core questions which were:

1. Did you try the new product?
2. What was your overall satisfaction with the new product?
3. Would you order the new product again?
4. Is the new product something you would like to see added permanently?

These questions were asked only in pre-designated geographic areas, with data pulled only from those locations offering the new products.

Results:
Instead of a very expensive, randomized survey with perhaps 300 to 500 responses to extrapolate from, the client received over 20,000 completed surveys from customers who had tried the new products in various combinations. The credibility of the data was at the highest possible level, and the incremental cost to collect this important data was… zero!

After some brief analysis was completed on the various combinations of products, the "winners" and "losers" among the new products clearly stood out. And concern over traditional surveying methods – issues such as valid statistical sampling, extrapolation biases, and incremental cost were all non-existent!

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