The Moderating Roles of Prior Experience and Behavioral Importance in the Predictive Validity of New Product Concept Testing

Concept testing has long been recognized as an important new product development (NPD) activity. As one of the widely used concept testing techniques, the method of intentions surveys relies on the purchase intentions of the potential buyers of new products and helps firms assess the viabilities of their new products before making major financial and nonfinancial commitments to their development. Despite the importance of intentions‐based new product concept testing and its widespread use by firms, the correspondence between initial behavioral intentions and subsequent purchase behaviors has been relatively low and heterogeneous, making it very difficult for firms to draw any useful conclusions from intentions surveys. Focusing on the predictive validity of intentions‐based new product concept testing and addressing several calls for future research to identify specific conditions making it more effective, this paper tests the moderating roles of prior experience and behavioral importance in the predictive validity of intentions‐based new product concept testing. It also tests whether people who state a positive intention and people who state a negative intention are equally accurate in their intentions. Finally, it tests the relative moderating roles of prior experience and behavioral importance in the intentions–behavior relationship. The results based on two longitudinal surveys first suggested that people's prior experience moderates the relationship between behavioral intentions and actual behaviors in a way that the relationship is stronger when prior experience is high as opposed to when it is low. Second, they showed that the level of importance that people attach to a behavior also moderates the relationship between behavioral intentions and actual behaviors such that the relationship is stronger when behavioral importance is high as opposed to when it is low. Third, they indicated that the behavioral intentions of people who state that they will not perform a behavior are more accurate than are those of people who state that they will perform it. Finally, the results suggested that the impact of behavioral importance is greater than that of prior experience. This study offers several implications. Most notably, the results can help firms better understand different factors affecting the predictive validity of intentions‐based new product concept testing and hence make more accurate new product decisions.