Developing and testing new products for a cleaning brand

The question

A household cleaning brand wanted new products for several cleaning jobs, and a pipeline it could prioritize with confidence.

A pair of its propositions was aimed at one cleaning job. The brand wanted to know whether they could work together in one range, how far apart they stood, and what the added benefit in one of them was worth to buyers. A pair that confused shoppers could take sales from each other and from the brand’s existing products.

Our approach

Every concept was judged against a strong product from its own cleaning job, because one shared norm across jobs would flatter some ideas and bury others.

For the pair aimed at the same job, the test read each one alone and then the pair together: who would buy each, how far those buyers overlapped, and whether a new product would add buyers or move them from the brand’s existing range.

Readiness in buyers’ eyes was kept apart from technical and commercial readiness, which stayed the brand’s own judgment.

What the team came away with

The work ran in two stages, and the brand came back for the second.

The first gave it a prioritized concept pipeline across several cleaning jobs, with closer work on the strongest concepts. The second was a quantitative range test with modeled volumes and price expectations, each read as an estimate under the tested conditions.

Which concepts to take forward, and whether the pair belonged in one range, could now be weighed on evidence matched to each question, with a clear view of what each new product might add to the business.