Today’s markets are highly competitive and often difficult to break into. With so many well-established companies that have a lot of brand recognition and have built a loyal customer base, the new kids on the block have to work really hard to make a name for themselves.

The first steps in this long and arduous process are market research and developing the right brand identity, of course, but that’s just scratching the surface. Your main goal is to come out with a product that is actually good, desirable, and useful. All the marketing in the world won’t help you if your product isn’t up to par.  

Since most new businesses only get that first chance to carve out a piece of the market and start growing their brand, you want to make darn sure that the first wave of products that hit the shelf are just right. This is why it pays to take the time to test your products but don’t just take my word for it – let’s explore the benefits and purpose of product testing.    

The 3 Reasons Product Testing is So Important

There are a lot of reasons to test a product before launch, but the most important benefits you get from it are the following three:

• See how well your offer fits your target audience – what you have in mind and what people really need and want can be quite different, and you’ll never know unless you do some product testing first.
• Lower the risk of returns and bad reviews – if your product doesn’t really match the quality standards that your competitors have set or, even worse, fails to perform on the most basic acceptable level or is prone to malfunction, you’ll get a bad reputation right off the bat. Testing helps you avoid negative feedback and wasting money on fixing problems that could have been avoided.
• Ensure that your product is completely safe – an even worse scenario than having your products break or underperform is dealing with injuries caused by faulty products and the impending lawsuits. The money you’ll waste and the bad publicity you’ll get will bury your brand before it has the chance to develop, so testing before launch is extremely important.

Now that we’ve established the importance of product testing, let’s move on to the purpose that the different types of test serve.   

The different types of testing and their purpose

The test you perform on a product as it moves from the initial idea and through several prototypes are all part of the Quality Assurance process. You have to focus on QA best practices to ensure that the end result matches your idea and what your marketing will promise to customers.

This should go hand in hand with the development process and you should be a bit more rigorous here, as you don’t want to hit the market with a suboptimal product that looks good but breaks apart or fails to perform. You are essentially teting for a few major things:

• Functionality – this is all about finding out whether your product is able to serve its purpose, how well it performs the different roles it can be employed in, and how easy it is to use and maintain. Essentially, you are going over the basic points that will later make it into the user manual and making sure that everything works well.
• Performance and customer satisfaction – while your product might be physically able to perform several roles, it doesn’t automatically mean that it can perform them well enough to meet industry standards or to put you ahead of the competition. Customer satisfaction is closely tied to how well the product does its job so it’s crucial to get this part right before moving on.
  
• Durability and reliability – if all goes well, you should have a product that performs well and offers plenty of functionality, but that will have all gone to waste if it breaks down within a month of leaving the store. This is the part where you find out what type of material works best, the most secure method of construction, and so on.
• Safety – this is important for both legal and moral reasons so pay extra attention to this part of the QA process. Your product should be 100% safe for users when used appropriately and for reasonable tasks, of course.   

With all these tests behind you, it will be much easier to determine exactly where your product is at in terms of durability, quality, and safety. It might take a bit of extra time before you get the product ready for market, but proper product testing will ensure that it’s smooth sailing once you do.  

Building a Strong Brand Starts with Offering Quality Products

In essence, what product testing and the whole QA process help you do is offer a product that your customers will find useful, reliable, and a joy to use. There are a lot of things that customers value in a product and proper product testing can help you tick off as many of those boxes as possible before your vares even reach the shops. This is why testing should be viewed as an integral part of the product development process.