Message Testing / Story Construction
A product’s promotional story should be primarily shaped by its customers—composed of what they perceive as its most important, differentiating, and compelling attributes and benefits. Message testing studies that culminate in story construction exercises elicit the structure and content of this optimal promotional story. An initial step on these studies is consultative—we work closely with client teams to develop a set a compelling and comprehensive set of messages for subsequent testing. The team identifies several categories of messages—typically 4-7 categories—that will play an important functional role in the product promotional story. The client team then ideates and composes a series of message elements / candidates within each category. During the interviews, respondents assess all the messages in each category. They select the top messages in each category and elaborate on why they find these messages motivating.
Drawing from their selection of top performing messages in each category, respondents arrange the messages sequentially to construct the story that is most likely to persuade them to use the product preferentially over competitors. We excel at these message testing and story construction studies, in part, because our researchers tend to push harder to elicit and understand the underlying reasons for respondents’ favorable and unfavorable views of certain messages. This provides insights that help to refine and optimize the messages throughout the story. We have also done many of them—both among professional (HCPs) and consumer / patient audiences—at a significantly lower cost than our competitors.
