Incisive Marketing

I’m doing product testing and evaluation for a consumer electronics company, whose name I can’t mention because I’m under NDA. Suffice it to say that it is a well-known brand in the telecom office products space. This is the second product I am evaluating for them, and by now I am known to a least a couple of the product managers at the company. My office is close enough to their headquarters so that they can occasionally drop by and do some video of their products in action.

I suspect I get called back (by this company and others) because I attempt to add value in my evaluations. Rather than checking a box that says I like the packaging, for instance, I’ll tell them that I think the images on the outer packaging address their target demographic pretty well, and they could potentially improve their reach by using a slightly different image. It’s not that I am being overly generous — I just can’t help myself.

This strikes me as a relevant product evaluation strategy. If your company needs to test products, packaging, or even messages, tapping marketing consultants as evaluators seems like a highly-leveraged, win-win approach. For my trouble, I get to observe the brand characteristics of companies (who aren’t yet clients), and a couple hundred dollars to spend on Amazon, while the company not only gets their evaluation, but they also get marketing perspective from outside their four walls.