Concept Screening

Why this matters for your decision

The starting point is often ten, twenty or, with AI support, a hundred ideas. Testing all of them on behaviour would be expensive and slow. Concept screening sorts them quickly: which ideas do people understand, which seem relevant, which fit the brand? Surveys, MaxDiff and expert panels do good work here.

For the investment decision, however, a screening result is rarely enough. Screening measures liking, comprehension and stated willingness to buy. For new products in particular, stated purchase intent reflects later sales less accurately than for existing products (Morwitz, Steckel & Gupta 2007). In addition, the best concepts in a screening are often close together. Which of them is chosen when price and alternatives are visible only becomes clear in behaviour.

The sensible division of labour: screening for breadth, a behavioural test for the two to six variants between which the investment decision is made.

How to set up a screening

A few criteria set in advance help: comprehensibility, relevance for the target group, differentiation from your own range and from competitors, feasibility. The concepts should be presented in a comparable form in the screening, equally long and equally concrete, otherwise the best-worded one wins. And it is worth deliberately carrying forward a variant that polarises in the screening: unusual ideas often score lower on rating scales than their effect at the moment of the offer. The end result is a short list whose variants differ clearly in one dimension.

Example

A telecommunications provider has 18 ideas for a family tariff. A survey with rating scales narrows them down to three, all of which score similarly well. In the Painted Door Test, each person sees exactly one of the three tariffs as a realistic offer. Around 2,500 visitors per variant reach the offer page. Tariff C, in third place in the screening, reaches a measured sign-up intent of 2.4 percent, the other two 1.6 and 1.5 percent.

Distinction

The concept test is a method often used in screening: people rate a concept on scales for liking, novelty and willingness to buy. AI concept screening uses models or synthetic respondents for the same pre-selection. The Painted Door Test is not part of screening, but of validating the final variants.

Limits

Screening can filter out strong concepts, for example unusual ideas that are hard to explain in surveys but convince at the moment of the offer. If in doubt, include such an idea as an additional variant in the behavioural test. Conversely, the behavioural test only tests what goes into it. It cannot correct a poor screening.

After screening, Horizon tests the variants in a Painted Door Test with real people, without a panel and without incentives, with up to six variants.