How to Pivot your business (Part Two) : Testing your ideas

Guest Post by Alistair Williams - Marketing and Innovation Director and the Founder of Creation.

You don’t need the resources of a full UX team or R&D department to be able to test your ideas. In fact when launching Vogue Business we were able to test things quickly and effectively in a series of managed sprints that gave rapid insight into whether or not our ideas or hypothesis worked and informed what we did next. It’s an approach that innovation teams apply to both startups and big blue chips alike and follows a few simple phases. And the beauty of it. You can do it from your own desk with very little resources.

Stage 1: Decide What to Test

Your new offering could have a whole range of elements that need to be tested and by focusing on the relative importance of the following you’ll be able to evaluate the priorities. Ensure that you’re keeping desirability, feasibility and viability in mind. (A reminder. Desirable - do you customers/clients want it?. Feasible - can you provide it? Viable - can you make money from it?)

Collating all of these elements is your first step. Just simply start each element with “I believe that…..”

Stage 2: Map out your beliefs/assumptions

A simple place to start is write down on a sticky-note or card each belief and assumption and then arrange these into some sort of hierarchy of importance. Using a wider team to do this as a team exercise always works well (can can be done remotely).

Examples could be: ‘I believe that ...People are prepared to travel for this event’, or ‘I believe that… we can meet socially distancing expectations’, ‘I believe that we can charge £100 for….’

Plot their relative importance and ease of testing on the four-square grid below. Those that are highly important and easy test should be something that you crack on without delay, while those less important and more difficult to test can be discarded for the time being.

Stage 3.Design the tests

For each of these beliefs/assumptions, you now need to work them into a hypothesis that your tests can validate.

‘We can deliver a virtual event that people will pay for’. Or when launching Vogue Business Talent, ‘we can engage with the top luxury fashion talent who will sign up to our offering’.

You’ll need to be clear about defining the audience and understanding what results will prove your hypothesis.

There are endless ways to test your hypothesis and numerous iterations (just search on Google) but these are my five favourites:

The Stripped Down MPV (minimum viable product)

You’d never launch a full app or new offering without testing a prototype first. Therefore work out what is the quickest, most cost-effective way of launching a trial product. It shouldn’t have all the elements and features of the final product at this stage but it MUST have the key element.

For Vogue Business Talent we were able to build an onbrand, front-end site that looked the part quickly and easily. We could then refine based on evaluating user experience and journey without investing in costly back-end tech integration in the early days .

The Swan

With the appearance of effortlessly gliding across the water, the swan’s webbed feet are furiously paddling away out of sight. You can deliver a great user experience when in fact behind the scenes you may be manually handling all operations. If it looks the part and feels the part, you will be able to evaluate the potential. Even if this means that it’s extremely labour intensive at the start. Ever wondered why some online shops are taking so long with your order? It could well be that they are taking your order then having to physically hunt down the product that they need to fulfill while testing desirability and viability.

The Interview

Use open questioned interviews to understand how your audience uses competitor products or services. Then ask a ‘what if?’ question to gauge their interest in your offering. This not only provides in-depth user experience data, but also early insight into the desirability of your offering. Focus on the makeup of your study group and ensure that they meet the criteria of your core audience. Gaining commitment for future product testing from this cohort is also invaluable.

The Disposable Brand

Invaluable if you want to directly market test a pivot that could in some way contradict your current brand offering. The disposable brand allows you to explore a new area without giving away too much. The simplest version would be some mocked up adverts for your offering, specifically targeting an audience via social ads. If you can explore some A/B testing as part of it, then a very limited budget can provide great insight.

We tested the interest in edible insects (yes!) in this way for an organisation that was far from keen to be seen entering the market. And were able to identify not only a key new audience but the desirability based on a series of A/B tests.

The Video

If you’ve no budget to design or build an MVP, then create a video to illustrate what it could be. Host it on a landing page and evaluate interest. Be creative. But be sure to be clear about the proposition. Dropbox launched in exactly this way picking up huge audiences and demand along the way.

If you’d like to explore ways in which we could help thrash out an idea or shape a business plan - drop me a note: alistair@creationconsultancy.co.uk

About Alistair Williams:

Alistair sits on the Goho advisory board and has a long working relationship with Stacey our MD.

Ex-Guardian and Condé Nast, he's a marketing and innovation director and the founder of Creation, a consultancy that combines marketing, innovation and branding to help create progress for businesses, teams and individuals.

https://www.creationconsultancy.co.uk/post/essential-creation-tools-the-business-model-canvas