Modern concept & campaign testing – Powered by mobility for quick decision-making

Companies with consumer targeted offerings are challenged in the market every day. Timely deliveries, operational excellence, quality of service, and the quality of products offered and consumed. Competition never rests. While companies, for example those that operate in the fiercely competed FMCG business, are constantly tested in the market, the creative agencies that are missioned to help their clients win in the market face different challenges. They need to offer better value to their clients than their agency peers. Better ideas, better concepts, better sketches, better campaigns. Better validation and proof on what will work, and why. It’s a brutal yet inspiring game, where concept and campaign testing play a decisive role in building success and client loyalty.

Yesterday’s pain points

Understandably, agencies’ focus is on the ideation and creatives. As clients are all the time looking ways to grow the market share and nurture the existing customer base, there is a need to explore, renew, and try out new things. This makes creative minds tick; it is a privileged position to aim at creating something that changes the game out there in the market. Traditionally, the focus has been on creative thinking and solid professional experience. In future, this will continue to be the measure of winning agencies, but the scope of professionality is taking new shapes. Today, you need to support your designs and proposals with proof and validation.

What would be a better source of proof and validation than consumers themselves? This is commonly known, but agencies have had obvious challenges to run concept and campaign tests in a way that supports their internal processes and work. Cycles and deadlines are always tough; the work should have been ready yesterday. Everybody is busy at creating, nobody has time to think about testing. Or those who would have the time, do not have the experience on concept testing to have it done. And even if there was time and experience, it is not tempting to test unless the activity has been included in the budget with the client before the project started? Time, resources, money, lack of intuitive consumer engagement methods.

Turn pain into an advantage

People are mobile. Technology is mobile. Clients’ requirements and expectations will not get lighter tomorrow. There are ways to turn the traditional pain points into an asset and strategic advantage. From the client’s perspective, is it reasonable to expect argumentation with test-based validation on the proposed solution? From the agency’s perspective, is it meaningful to integrate test-based validation in the design process, supporting the proposed approach? Yes and yes; this is where systematic, process integrated insights model builds trust, generates upsell opportunities and strengthens client loyalty.

On store concept design and development, product innovation process, and strategic service design planning it is self-evident to invite target consumers to co-ideate. These processes are usually less time and pressure driven than the design processes of campaign materials that have tight channel plans and timeboxes. Nowadays, it is difficult to think about a product or service offering that would not have online presence. Virtually everyone has a smartphone, and online websites are commonly visited before making purchasing decisions on medium or high cost purchases. Online experience is never ready; it can (and need) always be improved, optimized, or changed based on competition’s activities or changing consumer behaviours.

“The approach we followed with Crowst removed the common mis-synch and lag between the online experience and study response, resulting in genuine, direct consumer insights”

-Eemeli Tani, Campaign Analyst at TBWA\Helsinki

With Crowst, you can invite thousands of consumers to validate your designs, telling what works and why. You get results in minutes; with broad targeting, you typically get 300 responses within the first hour. Launch the study in the morning, and you will have the results by lunch time, automatically visualized as graphs and wordclouds.

“We need a quick pulse check that clearly shows us the consumer preference on the project at hand, results that allow us to act and make decisions immediately”

-Jaakko Veijola, The Founding Partner at Wörks Agency

Our service model is designed to enable testing at reasonable cost. Starting with 300€, you can test your designs with the speed you need. Do you have a resource problem? At Crowst, we know how busy it can get at work. Thus we do our best to make it easy for you. Based on your targets and input, we propose the study structure with questions, target, launch, schedule, quality check, and complete your study. We also reward the respondents, included in the price. On the Crowst Dashboard, you see the real-time study progress at any time, and you can export the study data to your own computer.

You can read more about our collaboration with TBWA and Wörks agencies on our blog.

20 000 consumers are motivated to help you

Consumer products and services are designed and launched to serve the consumers needs in the market. We are all consumers, and we all have a vested interest to be able to use offerings that serve our needs the best. Today, Crowst has over 20 000 consumer respondents, Crowsters, covering 260+ cities and towns in Finland. They are motivated to help you succeed. The better you succeed in your design and launch processes, the stronger is the value for consumers.

Sports fanatics, fashionistas, pet owners or food connoisseurs. These are just examples of the audiences and attributes that can be used on the Crowst service to find and match you audience sweet spot, contributing to the relevance, validity and reliability of the study results. Launching a new craft beer to the market? Do it together with your target audience as Saimaa Brewing Co, in the spirit of direct insights. The craft beer lovers do not want a poor, half-baked product to the store shelves. They want to help you succeed.

We work with several leading, award-winning agencies and consumer brands. Contact us, let’s talk how we can maximize your chances to win before the launch: contact@support.com

Written by

Jyrki Kallinen

Tired of outdated and expensive research methods? Call or send me an email, we have the cure at Crowst.

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