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Concept development, evaluation and testing in the new (food) product development situation are reviewed. An analysis is made of why, how and when to concept test, based on previous authors' work and various pre‐product launch situations. Emphasis is made of concept testing's validity and its use as an aid in successful product development. The use of concept testing during the reformulation of existing products is considered in depth — an area which has previously lacked adequate appraisal. The flexibility of concept testing is highlighted in particular case study examples, reflecting a feeling that concept testing should not be isolated within the new product development process.

The topic of “low‐cost product use testing for R&D guidance and early market evaluation” entails four different business concepts. It implies that the most successful path to total new product development incorporates testing that (1) is centered around human use evaluation, (2) is designed primarily to guide R&D scientists and engineers, (3) provides some early marketing strategy development for the brand manager before the product is fully developed, and (4) is inexpensive. That has been precisely the case at Gillette for the past 18 years.

The purpose of this paper is to better understand current concept testing practice and its role in the new product development process; identify the relationship, if any, between concept testing design and perceptions of its effectiveness; determine what evidence product managers or research consultants have for the reliability and validity of current concept testing.

A survey of new product managers collected detailed information on their organization's most recent traditional or conjoint concept testing project. In the study of marketing research consultants, 100 firms were asked to provide the publicly available information about the reliability and validity track record of their concept testing services.

There are differences between practices for incrementally and radically new concepts. Practitioners prefer to keep their information proprietary, so little has been learned about how concept tests should be designed, despite the thousands of concepts tested every year.

The paper identifies current concept testing practice, including which methods/models are used, what is known about their reliability and validity, and the perceived problems and desired improvements.

The paper identifies how concept testing is currently carried out and those issues most in need of future research.

Consumer responses of attribute liking and intensity as well as overall liking of commercial chocolate were evaluated in four types of testing situations (central location, in‐home, teaching laboratory and formal sensory laboratory). The aim was to determine if there were differences in these responses based on testing situation. This was also an attempt to evaluate and validate the use of in‐home testing for product development samples. Perceptions of certain attributes were found to differ in different testing situations but liking scores of these attributes did not. Consumers were more critical of attributes when tested in a formal sensory laboratory. All four locations tested gave similar results, meaning that, conducting sensory panels at home is as valid a method of collecting consumer opinion as traditional locations. It should be noted that the use of a formal sensory laboratory might have an impact on cost effectiveness of new product development. Results are more likely to indicate the need to continue formulation in order to perfect attribute scores, although this may not actually improve consumer‐liking scores. This continued product development only serves to increase the costs and slow the speed to market.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of innovativeness, change seeking and cognitive effort on consumer responses to traditional versus virtual testing environment.

The empirical study collects concept evaluations of five heterogeneous consumer appliances, from 400 members of an online panel. Generalizability theory (hereafter G theory) is used to assess the psychometric quality of the evaluation data in different testing environments.

The results show that subjects with high innovativeness and change seeking report significantly more favorable concept evaluations and generate better quality data. However, the effect of innovativeness on testing outcomes and data quality would be reduced in virtual testing environment.

The results indicate that using firm or industry norms to interpret the testing outcome will be biased unless it accounts for whether the screening processes result in equally innovative or variety seeking samples of respondents.

Managerially, the current results indicate that a product manager wanting to concept test a pool of appliance concepts can benefit from screening for the respondents, who will provide higher quality concept testing data in a traditional testing environment. However, the effects of traits on data quality are mitigated in a virtual testing environment. The findings provide a surprising insight that subject selection is not a more critical issue in virtual testing.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a model‐based methodology for the repetitive testing of multiple products with limited capacity, when the testing process is imperfect.

In a repetitive testing process, items that are classified as non‐conforming may be conforming, resulting in excessive scrapping of good items. Failed items are commonly retested to reduce scrapping costs. This paper develops a stochastic optimization formulation and its solution to determine the numbers of repetitive tests for multiple products that minimize the sum of the expected scrapping costs and variable testing costs, subject to a testing equipment capacity constraint. It also develops a procedure to estimate the parameter values that are used in the optimization formulation.

Computational experiments are conducted to evaluate the estimation and solution procedure and to understand the effect of testing machine capacity on the optimal total cost. These results demonstrate the viability of the proposed approach and the criticality of accurate parameter estimation.

This research shows the usefulness of the proposed optimization/statistical estimation approach to a real‐life complex inspection problem. However, the proposed model has to be modified when the characteristics of the testing equipment are changed.

The authors capture the idiosyncrasies in semiconductor manufacturing such as the high outgoing quality level, the repetitive testing environment, the high coefficient of variation in the number of failure products, and the testing capacity constraint. Conducting extensive computational experiments, the authors demonstrate that the proposed approach is viable.

The paper describes a complex, real‐life inspection management situation, develops a rigorous model‐based solution approach, and carefully demonstrates its viability.

Reviews the experience of testing the CAT CD450 software. Discusses OCLC and Beta testing. Considers some of the challenges that one encounters when performing tests, including ethical issues. Offers guidelines for successful Beta testing, and finally considers whether or not librarians should be the ones to participate in testing.

Judicious application of concept tests to specific situations contributes not only to the success of the product but also to the success of the product manager. Recognizing respondent limitations helps product managers estimate risk of product failure as well as explain failure to higher management. Respondents have limited ability to keep track of large numbers of items. New situations make categorization difficult. Respondents can seldom imagine or project beyond the test into an actual buying situation. Inadequate risk evaluation hampers decisions and ratings. Design tests falter when the full range of critical issues is not included. Managers improve success probabilities by using more stages in testing, simplifying requests of respondents, and adequately framing the evaluations to be made.

Examines the potential of predictive models in the product testing stage of new product development. Draws on experience gained from a series of interviews with senior managers in the marketing departments of advertising and market research agencies and manufacturers of fast‐moving goods in the confectionery industry. Aims to give insight into the practical problems and acceptability of such models. Identifies alternatives to the models by examining problems in new product development. Reveals that no standard approaches are common in the confectionery industry especially and suggests that evidence militates against the use of models in the product testing stage of new product development.

There is an apparent lack of research investigating how different test conditions influence or bias consumer sensory evaluation of food. The aim of the present pilot study was to determine if testing conditions had any effect on responses of an untrained panel to a novel chicken product. Assessments of flavour, texture and overall liking of corn‐fed chicken were made across three different testing conditions (laboratory‐based under normal lighting; laboratory‐based under controlled lighting; and, home testing). Least favourable evaluations occurred under laboratory‐based conditions irrespective of what lighting was used. Consumers perceived the product more favourably in terms of flavour (p < 0.001), texture (p < 0.001) and overall preference (p < 0.001) when evaluated in the familiar setting of the home. Home testing produced more consistent assessments than under either of the two laboratory‐based test conditions. The results imply that home evaluation should be undertaken routinely in new food product development.