• by Karlene Lukovitz  @KLmarketdaily, March 22, 2017

Nielsen is launching its latest new product concept testing iteration today.

Called Quick Screen, the tool promises to provide fast-moving consumer goods manufacturers (FMCG) with a reliable, overnight consumer read on which ideas have greater probabilities of in-market success.

The tool is designed to fill a need for a cost-effective solution at the “second-tier” product innovation level, reports Kevin Daly, SVP Nielsen Innovation. 

CPG companies are under greater pressure than ever to bring new products to market quickly, but most resources are allocated to major or first-tier innovations. This means that other new product efforts often get little or no reliable testing prior to launch — resulting in high in-market failure rates, Daly notes to Marketing Daily.

In Quick Screen, representative samples of consumers who have self-identified as being users within a product category are asked to choose among groups of product ideas. The questions are designed to determine the relative strength of each idea on two factors known to be highly predictive of in-market success: relevance to consumer needs/desires and uniqueness or differentiation. 

Nielsen then uses proven predictive analytics to rank the ideas for probability of in-market success.

Like Concept Quick Predict -- another innovation screening tool, which was introduced in the U.S. and most of Nielsen’s other markets last fall -- Quick Screen is powered by Innovation Studio, an interactive online platform that lets users share product idea information, collaborate, analyze results and produce customized reporting. 

Quick Predict was designed as a digitally based solution that yields results within about a week — versus the several weeks required for results from SnapShot, Nielsen’s long-standing new product idea testing solution in which results were delivered in PowerPoint format, according to Daly. 

Quick Predict was designed for higher-investment and farther-along product launch initiatives. In addition to taking several days to produce results, Quick Predict evaluates just one idea at a time, and yields a higher level of predictive precision — results that can be used for actual forecasting and budgeting purposes, says Daly. That makes it somewhat more expensive than the new Quick Screen, which can rank and tell marketers which ideas are most likely to succeed, but can’t precisely quantify their likelihoods of success. 

Nielsen’s approximately half-dozen Quick Screen beta tests with clients’ real new product ideas bore out its value in helping users narrow down ideas, according to Daly.

Michelle Monkoski, consumer insights director at Sargento, which has used both SnapShot and Quick Predict, says she believes that Quick Screen can help increase efficiency in product research by enabling the brand to “identify the stronger ideas faster, and focus our resources on those sooner in the process.”

Quick Screen is being introduced simultaneously in the U.S. and most other Nielsen markets.