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A critical concern for corporations test marketing new products involves test market city evaluation. In order for test marketing to be successful, corporations must identify cities that offer a good fit with the firm’s overall product strategy. Unfortunately, little has been written to aid corporations in making complex test city selection decisions. Presents a model that combines the concepts of marketing, the management science technique of goal programming, and microcomputer technology to provide managers with a more effective and efficient method for evaluating test cities and making selection decisions. Extends the existing literature on test market evaluation by applying a computer optimization model to test market evaluation in a way that has not been done before.

A crucial phase in planning a new product or a major revision in an entry comes just prior to its introduction into regular business operations. At this time, the management focus is on consolidating the total program for introducing the offering to the marketplace. Marketers must engage in a sequence of important finalizing activities designed to achieve the most promising presentation.

Looks at the use of test‐marketing among European financial institutions. A total of 46 companies participated in the study. It is shown that, on average, test‐marketing is the least frequently conducted new product development stage (16‐18 per cent). It is also the least proficiently managed. Describes five factors that inhibit the use of test markets in the financial services sector: it is just as costly to test‐market as to launch; the new product is a copy of a competitor′s product; the value of the product has been established earlier through research; it is difficult to produce test‐market conditions; it is unwise to delay the product′s launch for competitive reasons. Finally examines some of the purposes of test‐marketing.

Test marketing has a long history: the precursor of all of today's market research methodologies was undoubtedly trial and error. However, it remains an area of vital interest today. The promise and the performance of high‐tech test marketing can be shown from the perspective of the Campbell Soup Company.

One of the most intractable problems facing marketing managements today is to know when to buy marketing research to enhance their understanding of the probability of success. Conversely, when will the expenditure and resultant delay outweigh the benefits from a reduction in uncertainty? Nowhere is this problem more keenly felt than in new product development. Launching new products is often vastly expensive, and available evidence suggests that products fail more often than they succeed. However, well researched “pilot” marketing and sequential launches give competition time to retaliate or imitate, thereby constituting risks of a different ilk. None the less, marketing managements are tending to carry out more and more test operations to attempt to assess the likely outcomes of broadscale operations. This article provides an early report from part of a research programme carried out at the University of Bradford into methods of marketing experimentation. It offers an integration of Bayesian decision theory and network analysis which, in conjunction with DCF techniques, provide a powerful tool of cost/benefit analysis.

The stimulus to this research project was an article by Thornycroft in the Financial Times where he wrote: “The old test marketing idea is virtually dead: it was too expensive. Once companies had committed themselves to manufacturing a new product for a launch in a sizable TV region they were almost bound by cash and executive conceit to proceed with it to a national launch, whatever the auguries. Now the most common procedure is a more selective test either through extensive consumer sampling or the Research Bureau's mini‐van operation or a Westminster Press test campaign, or a simulated supermarket or one of the other testing services on offer.” At the time this appeared a contentious statement—reducing conventional test marketing to little more than a shibboleth. In the event, it served as a hypothesis to study while, at the same time, provided scope for an examination of the newer methods of testing a product in the market‐place before national launch.

With the increasing costs of product failures, marketers need to be more systematic in their approach to assessing acceptance of new products. The general principles of test marketing are described and some of the errors which occur in a test market noted.

Purpose: This chapter investigates how researchers assemble market research test towns as hybrid sociotechnical arrangements. Researchers use various strategies in order to purify such hybrids into simplified representations of a fetishized imaginary, namely the average consumer.

Methodology/approach: The chapter is based on an analysis of secondary sources such as company documents. Theoretically, it draws on the concept of consumption assemblages and on anthropological theories of fetish.

Findings: Fetishization is a powerful way for both researchers and their clients to purify the hybrid assemblages they are part of into easily digestible categories such as “the real” and “the average.” In that process, the test town and its consumers emerge as a fetish that allows corporate clients to alleviate decision-making anxiety. Because of the nature of fetish, purification as a process remains incomplete.

Research Implications: These findings call for more social studies of market research as a set of practices that shape the identities of those who do the testing and forecasting. This chapter thus opens up test marketing and so-called test towns in particular as a field for consumer culture theory research.

Originality/value: This chapter provides insights into how market research creates test sites to simulate purchase behavior and pre-test consumer products. This chapter maps how different groups of actors and different technologies are enrolled in order to enact an ideal-type consumer averageness on an ongoing basis in a particular test town.

Data collected from 202 large and 92 small consumer goods manufacturing firms were analysed to examine the perceptions and experiences of these companies with test marketing as part of their new product development strategy. Seventy six per cent of the large companies and twenty four per cent of the small firms in the study test marketed their new products before full‐scale introduction. Chi‐square analysis indicated a relationship between firm size, type of business/industry, the scope of marketing operations, and whether the firm conducted test marketing or not. Cost, time constraints, and the generic nature of the product were the most prominent reasons cited by all firms for not conducting test marketing. In addition, small firms cited their size as amajor reason they did not engage in test marketing.

Many consumer and industrial goods manufacturers practise test marketing before launching innovative products on a national or wider scale. The commercial value of such testing is a direct function of both the accuracy with which the test results are interpreted, and the nature of the research design which is used to conduct the test, yet many companies fail at this most vital stage.