Researching Inventions

Conducting research on your product helps you sell your idea to investors, licensors, or marketing partners, more importantly it helps sell yourself to manufacturers, reps and others as it shows you have done your homework and know what you are doing, and research also helps you develop a winning product. The three types of research inventors use most often are observational, comparative and price point research.

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Observational Research

Observational research consists of just watching end users use the product, noting each step a user takes and then asking why he or she takes every step. This is the type of research that many industry giants such as Proctor and Gamble use regularly. If you observe four or five users in action you will use notice they compensate for different drawbacks to a product, drawback that they might not even realize exists. When I was the marketing manager of a company selling dental chairs, we had an engineer sit in a dental office and observe dentists. We found that dentists had many elderly patients that did not like to lie flat.

Dentists were twisting and turning and struggling to work on these patients. In response to this need, we created a new chair with an articulating headrest that allowed the patient’s back to be at a 45-degree angle while the patient’s head was still parallel to the floor. The articulating headrest feature helped the chair become the number-one-selling chair on the market in just six months.

You should do observational research on your product, to find flaws, or ways it can be improved, as well as on competitive products, so you know their weaknesses. Outlining your observational research is a great way to explain the competitive advantages of your product.

Comparative Research

This process simply asks buyers or end users to evaluate your product against three to seven other products asking them rank them by their likelihood of purchase. It is useful to do comparative research for both direct competitors –products that achieve the same benefit with a similar device, for example comparing five garlic presses – and for indirect competitors, for example products like the garlic twist that mince garlic in a totally different way, but give the same result to the consumer. The ideal set up is have people evaluate all the ideas, #1 for most likely to buy, #5 for least likely to buy and then ask people why they ranked the products as they did. People will prefer a product for a wide variety of reasons, easier to use, easier to clean, one product has a feature they feel is important, or other products have features that annoy the end user. This research gives you information on how to promote your product, which features are important / unimportant, and how important your differential advantages are to the consumer. If possible, I recommend you do this research before you go too far on your product development as you might want to make product changes after the research.

Price Point Research

All too often inventors price their product based on their manufacturing costs, and they end up with a price that is too high. Instead inventors should worry about what price end users will pay, and then target a manufacturing cost that is 25% of the selling price. If you can’t hit those manufacturing costs, you probably shouldn’t introduce the product, or you will need to look for a bigger market where the increased volume will help drive the price down.

Comparative and observational research are primarily done with end users. For price point research, try to include as many industry people as you can: store owners, retail sales people, marketing personnel or sales reps that sell products to the store. If you need help finding sales reps look at this article: https://patentsbydondebelak.com/articles/

Price point research is done just like comparative research, only you are looking for people to rank products from the most expensive to the cheapest. For the test, try competitive products that range from twice what you think your price should be to half of what you think your price should be. Then have people rank the products with # 1 being the most expensive to # 7 being the least expensive. You want to observe the products ranked just above your product and just below. If the product above yours is $7.00, and the one below is $5.50, then you know your product should be priced at about $6.00 to $7.00.

This price point will be important when negotiating with manufacturers because you can tell them the maximum price you can pay and important when you start to sell the product because you will have facts as ammunition when people try to get you to lower your price.

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