One of the more critical elements of product development is understanding how innovation and technology resonate with consumers.  Simple on the surface, the process in assessing innovation impact is multi-layered and lends itself most effectively to face-to-face concept testing and benefits articulation.  SLRG frequently embarks on such research for its sporting goods clients through a combination of customer intercept work at retail and carefully recruited qualitative depth interviews in controlled environments.  

The former allows us to find consumers that are literally in the right mindset for exposure to new product, often at the "moment of truth" juncture of the purchase funnel. Gleaning insights from these customers helps clients to see and hear how proposed new product introductions fit both within the customers' perception of brand equity within the particular product category as well as whether specific message points and differentiating elements of product composition or packaging, resonate and break through in the actual competitive environment.

Controlled testing allows our research team to better ladder up first from consumers' broad initial emotional and functional need states in the earlier stages of product consideration, through a more deliberate and forced examination of various features and design elements of a potential new product.

In our eleven years of servicing the sports industry, the SLRG research team has had the opportunity to delve into a number of unique research challenges.  Recently we had the pleasure to assist in a particularly interesting engagement, assisting two well known sports coaches and authors in developing a means to provide a self assessment battery for their readers and athletes.  Sports psychology is a multi-faceted discipline that these particular clients integrate into their coaching methods.  The SLRG team was tasked with creating a methodology from which an evaluation could be derived that properly weights and measures those attributes of the coaches' teaching system being implemented by their athletes.  The SLRG team first conducted a thorough audit of the coaches' upcoming book and spoke extensively with them about their experiences and results derived over their extensive coaching history. Next, a series of attributes and attitudes were identified to represent each of the key foundations of the clients' coaching methods and the desired outcomes that would best represent athlete learning and application of these principles.  The work derived from this phase were then tested, refined and crafted into a series of survey questions, which were later mathematically weighted to provide easy to understand evaluation metrics and normalized scoring.   The results will be incorporated in an upcoming book that will both share the coaching strategies of the authors and provide a means for readers to apply a self-diagnostic that will help accentuate those aspects of the coaching program that will be of best benefit to them. Let us know how we can help you apply research best practices to your most complex sports performance issues  HERE.