What exactly should you ask a customer when you test a new concept?
Advice on concept testing is easy to find and almost always stops one step short. Recruit your target audience, show them the concept, gather feedback, do not test more than a handful at once. All true, and none of it tells you what to put on the page in front of the customer.
The Innovation Expedition does. It is a visual toolkit, and one of its checklists is a concept test of exactly five questions, each scored from 1, meaning no, not at all, to 5, meaning yes, 100 percent.
Recognition. Do you recognise the customer situation and friction mentioned at the beginning? Clear. Is the concept clear to you? Attractive. Is the concept attractive to you? Fits the brand. Does the concept fit the brand mentioned? Buy. Are you interested in buying the concept?
Then one overall grade from 1 to 10, and three open fields: positive aspects, negative aspects, suggestions for improvement.
The order is the useful part. Recognition comes first, because a concept that scores badly there has a problem no amount of polish will fix: the customer does not have the problem you built for. Clear comes before attractive, so you can tell a weak idea apart from a badly explained one. And buy sits last, on its own, because interest and intent to purchase are not the same thing and a test that merges them tells you nothing.
The book carries a whole set of these instruments, including a twenty-five rule guide to brainstorming, ten criteria for a strong new concept, and a sixty-six point innovation checklist.