Editor’s note: Kelsey Sullivan is the content marketing manager at Zappi. This is an edited version of an article that originally appeared under the title “4 tips to help you reach innovation research master status.” 

Launching a new product or product variant can be daunting. You never know if you've got a hit until it hits the market and at that point, there's a lot riding on its success. But if you test, learn and optimize throughout your process, you can increase your confidence and ultimately create products people love. But how do you get there? How can you get to a place where you’re using insights to inform decision-making? A place where you can confidently say you’re creating products people love? Where you deliver innovations that consistently meet business objectives? 

That space is called reaching innovation research master status, below are some tips to help you get there. 

You’ll want to get consumer input at different stages of your innovation process to make sure you’re headed in the right direction. Oftentimes we forget just how challenging it can be to get your ideas on paper in a way that’s easy for consumers to understand and respond to. You can’t get quality, in-depth feedback from consumers if they don’t fully understand the idea — but they won’t read pages of information either.

To help keep things simple, implement these dos and don’ts when writing for concept tests: 

Do

Don’t

The aim of your innovation research should be twofold:

These are both critical to the success of your innovation and can be done by evaluating the attributes of your product or service. You can think of attributes as short, descriptive statements you want your product idea to be associated with. Your research should help you assess how much people associate each attribute with your idea. Your attributes need to be actionable enough to help you learn something about how to o...