Market Research for Product Development in Healthcare & Wellness
In the always-evolving healthcare and wellness industries, the only constant is change. Research from just a few years ago is already considered “old” by medical professionals, and technology is continually upending consumers’ expectations. Healthcare providers, health insurance companies, and manufacturers of health and wellness products know they must innovate constantly—but how? In what direction? The only way to ensure their innovations are genuinely meeting the needs of patients or customers is to conduct healthcare market research.
Each product or service has a lifecycle that spans from its initial conception (perhaps in an R&D lab or ideation session) to development and testing to launch and then continual iteration and (hopefully) sales growth. Healthcare-specific market research is crucial at all of these stages of the medical product development lifecycle. In this article, we’ll walk you through each of these stages and show how we can help you use market research to achieve the goals of that stage.
Market Research for Healthcare & Medical Product Ideation
The first step in innovation is coming up with a new product or service. While many clients come to us with a product idea already in hand—maybe even prototyped and ready to test—other clients come to us not yet knowing what kind of new product or service they want to offer. We help these clients conduct exploratory healthcare market research to identify unmet needs and “white space” for innovation in their industry and decide which ideas are worth pursuing.
Exploratory Qualitative Research
Research at this stage is often qualitative in nature, such as in-depth interviews, ethnography studies, and focus groups. It’s difficult to generate ideas for innovation through quantitative methods like surveys because we “don’t know what we don’t know”—that is, we can’t construct closed-ended questions when we don’t even know what to ask about. Qualitative methodologies are generally better at producing surprising insights and revealing the rich, nuanced textures of consumers’ lives.
For example, when a health insurance company wanted to identify ways to help seniors improve their health through technology, we conducted in-home ethnographic interviews with dozens of seniors on their health habits and uses of technology to identify health problems and barriers that tech could help solve.
Emerging Trends Research
Although we typically go directly to consumers to find out what kind of health and wellness products or services they need, sometimes we also conduct secondary market research in healthcare to identify emerging trends. These studies generally focus on a specific niche or subsegment of the healthcare or wellness market and use online research and reportage (e.g., tech journalism, white papers from consulting firms, and government reports) to expand our view of possible areas of innovation and put our primary research in context.
Ideation Workshops
In addition to primary and secondary research on consumers, Campos also conducts in-person or virtual ideation sessions to help companies draw out and refine innovative product ideas from their own ranks. By gathering staff and leadership from across the company into small groups and conducting human-centered design activities, then iterating on the ideas that surfaced, we can often arrive at detailed, plausible new product or service concepts within the space of a single day.
Market Research for Healthcare & Medical Product Testing
Once you have a concept for a new product or service idea in hand, your following questions are likely to be about the product’s viability in the market. And, as prototypes or early versions of the product or service are developed, you’ll want to test these with actual consumers representing the target audience to optimize their performance. Healthcare market research is vital at each of these stages.
Concept Testing & Demand Feasibility Research
One of the most challenging questions to answer for a new health or wellness product or service is: Is there enough demand for this product in the market to justify our investment in developing it? Typically, at this stage, we turn to quantitative research to estimate market demand.
We do this by fielding large-scale surveys of the target market or markets (typically online, although phone surveys or in-person intercepts might be used for some types of products or services). We present a short description of the product or service concept and ask questions gauging the respondents’ reactions to specific benefits or features—and, crucially, how likely they would be to buy or use such a product. These surveys can also incorporate questions testing the most effective messages for marketing the product.
Wellness & Medical Product Testing
Testing a new product or service with consumers is a crucial step in the medical product development cycle. Even the most brilliant engineers in the world can’t anticipate everything that could go wrong and all the ways that users might get confused, misinterpret directions, etc. Part of the purpose of product testing is to iron out those wrinkles in the user experience. But another part of the purpose is to see how actual users feel about the product—what do they enjoy most about using it? What are they unenthusiastic about? How do they think the product could be improved?
For example, for years, we partnered with a startup called Ebb to test their product, a mask with proprietary cooling technology that helps people fall asleep faster and stay asleep longer. We partnered with Ebb to design trials that allowed their team to understand product strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities. They ultimately created a product that positioned the company for a $38 million acquisition.
Healthcare and medical device companies often have particular constraints and considerations they must take into account when testing products. Patient privacy and safety are paramount. For any products or services used for medical or clinical purposes, Campos consistently partners with the client’s clinical teams, who design the study and ensure its safety for participants. We then recruit and manage participants, collect the data, and analyze and report on the results, but we are careful to give clinicians complete control of the testing protocol.
In any project, though, we consult with the client to advise them on the best testing methodology for their product and goals. One of the techniques we use is at-home testing, which typically includes interviews and a diary study. We ship a device or product to the participant, provide instructions, and allow them to use it for a limited period, recording their observations and reactions regularly using an online diary platform. Often, we’ll conduct in-depth interviews with the testers before and after their use of the product to understand the full context of their experience and receive rich, qualitative feedback.
Another standard methodology is to conduct in-person user tests, either hosted at our research facility in downtown Pittsburgh, at a client site, or elsewhere. We can mimic many kinds of real-life settings in our facility—for instance, we’ve created mock bedrooms to test sleep aid devices and shopping setups for products purchased at retail stores.
Consumer & Patient Recruitment
One key aspect of medical product testing that cannot be overlooked is the participants themselves. No matter how well-designed it is, a product testing trial will not succeed if the participants do not fit the target customer profile or are not engaged and committed to the research.
Campos takes great pride in its recruitment and respondent management work. We carefully collaborate with our clients to design screening surveys that ensure all prospective participants we engage with meet a minimum level of qualifying criteria. Then, we follow up with all qualified respondents personally to confirm they are eligible and critically assess whether or not they’d make a good research participant. Our recruitment team has decades of experience vetting respondents, giving our clients confidence that the resulting participant group not only fits their needs on paper but will provide high-quality, thoughtful feedback.
We take a similarly hands-on approach to respondent management throughout a trial, ensuring participants not only complete the trial but feel supported by Campos in every step of the process. If they have a question or concern or want the opportunity to speak with someone about the research, we’re their go-to point of contact and happy to help.
Marketing Healthcare & Medical Products
You’ve developed an innovative new healthcare product or service, you’ve validated its viability in the market and fine-tuned it by testing among actual consumers…what’s left? Launching the product or service, of course! However, a successful product launch requires more than just a good product. It requires a savvy go-to-market strategy and a well-crafted marketing plan. Again, healthcare market research is key in ensuring your new product or service sells.
Many of the same market research methodologies used by B2C brands are just as valuable for the healthcare industry, whether you’re targeting patients/users, clinicians, or other businesses.
Market Segmentation
Any effective go-to-market strategy begins with market segmentation. Segmentation surveys allow you to identify distinct groupings of consumers in a given market—say, wearable fitness device users—and understand the unique characteristics and motivations of those groupings. The goal is to identify one or more narrowly defined segments that your product is best positioned to appeal to and determine how to message to them about the product in a way they will find compelling.
For example, Campos has partnered with both health insurance organizations and wellness device makers to segment their markets. In these projects, we went beyond simple demographics, identifying and profiling segments within their markets based on shared psychographics, motivations, and behaviors.
Persona Development
As a further step after segmentation, many organizations opt to develop detailed marketing personas. These are generally 1–2 page profiles, each representing a fictional, paradigmatic person who brings that target segment to life—with demographic information, personality characteristics, family and career details, lifestyle and habits, and beyond. The information for building these personas usually comes from both a market segmentation survey and follow-up qualitative research with the target segments, such as focus groups or dyads/triads.
Buyer & Purchase Journey Research
A complement to segmentation and marketing personas is journey research. While personas focus on bringing to life a single paradigmatic person, the goal of journey research is to understand a typical process that customers in the target audience go through—say, when deciding which product or service to buy or when using the product or service itself. Typically, we conduct a series of in-depth interviews to learn about the experiences of many buyers/users and look for the commonalities among journeys, “pain points,” and “moments of delight.” To visualize the typical journey, we often create a graphic representation called a journey map, so you will sometimes hear this referred to as “journey mapping research.”
Choose Campos for Market Research in Healthcare for Medical Product Development
Campos has extensive experience designing and conducting product ideation, testing, and marketing research in the healthcare and wellness industries. What sets Campos apart? We like to think it’s the strength of our team and the way we collaborate with one another—and you. We have a seasoned team of recruiters, moderators, quantitative researchers, and strategists who collaborate to design and execute projects that meet our clients’ needs. And most importantly, we’re adept at synthesizing the data collected to deliver clear recommendations for creating, optimizing, and marketing products. Get in touch today to learn more.
