ENHANCING CONCEPT TEST VALIDITY BY USING EXPERT CONSUMERS

In standard concept testing practice, consumers may be invited to part icipate in a test if they use or possess the product. However, merely using or possessing a product is no guarantee that a consumer has the level of product knowledge that is necessary for judging the concept. Conducting a concept test with consumers who lack the necessary produc t knowledge may jeopardize the validity of the test results. That is, the results of such a concept test may not accurately indicate how con sumers will evaluate the real product. To ensure the validity of conce pt test results, Jan Schoormans, Roland Ortt, and Cees de Bont suggest that consumers who are invited to participate in a concept test shoul d possess a degree of product knowledge. When a consumer is asked to e valuate a concept, their product expertise allows them to understand p roduct information faster, fill in missing information, and learn more easily. Consumers with product expertise are better able to discrimin ate between important and unimportant aspects of a product. They are a lso better able to infer benefits from a product's physical attributes . To explore the effects of consumer expertise on the quality of the e valuations provided by concept tests, the authors conducted two experi ments, both of which resemble actual concept tests. The first experime nt examines the effect of consumer expertise on the results of a conce pt test for a major innovation, Videotext. This experiment tests the h ypothesis that the similarity between the evaluations of a concept and an actual product will be greater for consumers with a high level of product-category expertise than for consumers with low product-categor y expertise. The results of the experiment clearly support the idea th at product-category expertise enhances a respondent's ability to evalu ate concepts in a test of major innovations. From this, it is conclude d that only respondents with high product-category expertise should be used for concept tests of major innovations. The second experiment ex plores the effects of product expertise on consumers' evaluations of a minor innovation, a redesigned coffee maker. This experiment tests tw o hypotheses. First, it is proposed that consumers with high product e xpertise give more consistent evaluations in a concept test than consu mers with low product expertise. Second, it is suggested that consumer s with product expertise generate more stable evaluations over time th an consumers without product expertise. The results of this experiment clearly indicate that using consumers with moderate to high levels of product expertise is beneficial to the validity of the results from c oncept tests of minor innovations.