Leading Appliance Manufacturer:
In-Home Product Testing with Remote Videos

A leading manufacturer of appliances contracted Market Reader Pro® to help them assess their new, pre-market major appliances. In-home product testing helps them to increase their market share by gauging the level of acceptability of their new products, discovering any unforeseen issues, and helping to better understand consumers’ habits and attitudes. Customized Market Research: In-Home Product Testing Market Reader Pro® recruits qualified in-home product testers through a series of postcard, email, Web, and print advertisements. We provide customized market research, which means we can find consumers for a study that meet the highly specific demographic and geographic requirements of the appliance manufacturer. Over the course of six months to a year, Market Reader Pro® collects, analyzes, and reports on consumer feedback through surveys, in-home interviews, and SIRR™ interviews.

SIRR™, an acronym for Simple Internet Remote Reporter, is an audio and video reporting tool that was sent to consumer homes, connected to a high-speed internet connection, and turned on. From there, testers record their thoughts and findings on using the appliances. SIRR™ allowed the appliance manufacturer to experience an in-home interview without the hassle of travel and at a fraction of the cost of a traditional in-home interview. Additionally, we post audio and video files to a secure Web site, allowing all employees involved on a project—wherever they may be across the globe—to log on and see consumers using products in their own home environments.

Innovative Technology Used to Collect and Report on Consumer Feedback

Market Reader Pro® used our proprietary technological reporting approaches to quickly and effectively capture consumer feedback and provide the appliance manufacturer with reliable data in unique, customized formats. This information allowed our client to make needed product changes quickly and efficiently. Market Reader Pro®’s distinctive technological approaches for these studies include:

• Web Portal exclusively built and designed for our client
• In-home SIRR™ video interviews--recorded, analyzed, and posted on the Web Portal
• Usage Logs used by consumers to report daily use of the product that were quickly converted into PDF files and sent to our client
• Incident Summary Reports were emailed weekly to our client, accounting for any problems or irregularities that were noted by the consumer testers. Our staff followed up as instructed by our client.

Actionable Consumer Insight for Product Development and Marketing

Market Reader Pro®’s assistance plays a key role in the product development and marketing of the appliance manufacturer’s products. Our ability to recruit consumers of very specific demographic requirements, our grasp on consumer insight, and our quick turnaround time on findings are all extremely significant in our client’s decision to make changes to their test products and will also influence future product development for our client, allowing for better positioning in the market place. Both our reporting and our responsiveness have earned us many compliments from this appliance manufacturer. We’ve been told that we “raised the bar” for consumer studies within this company. We’ve been invited to take part in product testing steps beyond the consumer studies, which have not been outsourced in the past.