In an increasingly competitive building products market, companies can no longer afford to rely on gut instinct or internal assumptions when launching new offerings. Whether you're enhancing an existing product or rolling out a ground-breaking innovation, success hinges on one critical factor: understanding what your customers truly need and value.

That’s where Product Development Market Research becomes the not-so-secret weapon. It transforms product development from a gamble into a guided strategy — helping you define your value proposition, validate concepts, and fine-tune pricing and messaging to align with market demand. Let’s walk through how this approach plays out across the key phases of product development in the building products space.

What Is Product Development Market Research?

Product Development Market Research is the process of gathering, analyzing, and applying customer and market insights to guide every phase of a product’s life cycle or stage gate — from idea generation to market launch. For brands in the building products industry, this research plays a vital role in surfacing unmet needs, avoiding costly missteps, and delivering products that not only work in theory, but win with customers in the market.

From understanding pain points during the discovery phase to testing concepts, pricing strategies, and final messaging, this research helps ensure your product gains acceptance faster, increases sales, and earns long-term loyalty.

Stage 1: Discovery – Uncovering Needs, Use Cases, and Opportunities

Every strong product starts with a clear understanding of the problem it’s solving. In the discovery phase, the goal is to identify the needs, behaviors, and decision-making processes of your end users. In building products, this might involve talking to contractors, specifiers, DIY homeowners, or distributors — depending on who influences or makes the final call on product selection.

Some of the most important questions answered during this stage include:

• Who selects the product, and what influences their choice?
• Where, when, and how is the product used?
• What gaps exist in currently available options?
• What frustrations or workarounds do users have?

Through qualitative methods like in-depth interviews and focus groups, insights gathered in this phase highlight unmet needs and point to opportunity areas. This helps define who your best target customer is and what problems your product should aim to solve — laying a data-driven foundation for product ideation and concept development.

Stage 2: Concept Testing – Finding the Winners (and Letting Go of the Losers)

Once you’ve generated product ideas, it’s time to test them. Concept testing involves evaluating how your target market responds to different product concepts — before you invest heavily in design, production, and launch.

Key objectives of concept testing in the building products industry include:

• Gauging appeal and relevance of each concept
• Identifying the most compelling features and benefits
• Understanding how and where the product would be used
• Discovering which improvements are needed
• Estimating likelihood to purchase

Using both qualitative in person product usage testing and quantitative tools such as A/B testing, monadic testing, or MaxDiff scaling, you can measure which product concept has the highest market potential and what tweaks would improve its chances. This stage brings clarity on what will resonate — and what’s likely to flop.

No one wants to spend a million dollars on a product that no one wants to use. Solid concept testing helps you put your resources behind the ideas with the best odds of success.

Stage 3: Product Pricing – Understanding the Value Equation

Let’s say you’ve got a great concept — now comes the multi-million-dollar question: What should you charge for it? In building products, pricing can be especially complex due to varied buyer roles, budgets, and perceived value across different segments (e.g., pro vs. DIY, residential vs. commercial).

This is where pricing research and feature valuation come into play. By exploring price elasticity and feature importance modeling, you can:

• Determine which features most influence preference
• Understand willingness to pay at various price points
• Identify optimal feature bundles that maximize value
• Customize pricing strategies to increase conversion and retention

Ultimately, this allows you to balance profitability with accessibility Utilizing the methodology of conjoint (CBC, Menu-Based, Adaptive) you can measure product preferences across various feature combinations at all sorts of price points— ensuring that your price is aligned with the value your product delivers in the eyes of your customers.

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Aligning Product Development Research with Your Stage-Gate Process

One of the most effective ways to integrate market research into your product strategy is by aligning it with your stage-gate development process. At each critical milestone — from ideation and feasibility to commercialization — research can serve as a checkpoint that either validates your direction or signals a course correction.

For example:

• Gate 1 – Discovery and Exploration: Use discovery research to validate the problem and opportunity space.
• Gate 2 – Concept Screening: Screening product ideas to capture feedback on possible improvements and hurdles that would increase adoption
• Gate 3 – Concept Testing: Conduct concept testing to compare market fit and refine value propositions
• Gate 4 – Feature and Benefit Evaluation: Run pricing and feature studies to finalize product specs and positioning.
• Gate 5 – Launch: Use messaging research to fine-tune go-to-market communications.

By embedding research into each stage, you’re not just building products — you’re building the right products.

Final Thoughts: From Insight to Impact

In the building products industry, innovation alone isn’t enough. You need to develop products that solve real problems, appeal to the right audiences, and deliver a value proposition that sticks. Product development market research gives you the evidence and confidence to do just that — helping you make better decisions, faster, and avoid costly missteps.

Whether you’re aiming to improve an existing product line or disrupt the market with something new, research-backed product development helps you reduce risk, accelerate adoption, and win more in-market.

Written By Taylor Pence

Taylor has been serving clients and managing quantitative market research studies with The Farnsworth Group since 2015. Taylor also supports internal team development and training efforts to ensure the research team at The Farnsworth Group is current on best practices and equipped to deliver on high standards.

Taylor’s interest in the home improvement space began when he was about 10 years old upon discovery of ‘This Old House’ and Norm Abram’s ‘ New Yankey Workshop.’ Fast-forward a couple of decades and he still enjoys these sources of inspiration while tackling the perils of DIY in his own workshop. Taylor is proud husband to Lauren, and father to three awesome kids. Whenever possible, Taylor shares his hobbies with his kids, including playing music, tennis, golf, going fishing or putting his hands to a new project in the shop.

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