Posted by Stacie Savage, Inkjet Systems Communications

One of the most fun parts of my job is creating breakthrough messages. I define breakthrough messages as something that we can say to consumers that reassures them that they are buying the best product available. These are often superlative statements like the one in the headline of this post.

On October 5, a research company called Doxus issued a press release about an ease of use study that HP commissioned. This was partially in response to some customers who advised us of difficulties printing a photo at home on an inkjet printer.

Many of these customers were not using some of the key ease of use features that are available on their printers. On HP printers with digital camera memory card slots, the easiest way to print a photo is to insert the card into the slot and follow the instructions on the printer display screen. It usually just takes a couple of minutes to print a photo. However, a lot of people who own printers with this feature have never used it, and instead print photos through software or using a USB camera cable. These are also good ways to print photos, but they are not always the easiest way.

One thing I want to demonstrate to customers is that photo printing is really easy, and HP makes it especially easy. So I asked the people at Doxus to look into it. They did, and you can check out the results of the study.

Today, I don’t want to talk about this particular study so much, as I want to talk about using “3^rd-party” studies to validate product features and marketing claims. HP and other printer vendors use this approach with some frequency. We sometimes commission studies with external research agencies to validate our internal testing to ensure that the customer will indeed have the experience we expect them to have. While we’re at it, we also benchmark against competitors’ products, and, if that test also results in a messagable competitive advantage, we use the 3^rd-party study results to support that message.

As a matter of fact, press outlets do product comparisons at their own expense, and sometimes HP is allowed to use the results and sometime we’re not. And, because the press decides what product attributes they want to study, those attributes aren’t always what HP wants to talk about to consumers. Also, the studies we pay for are typically quantitative studies that involve hundreds if not thousands of consumer respondents all over the world. Most press outlets cannot afford to study attributes on that scale.

One example I like to point to in the U.S. is JD Power and Associates. Every time I’ve bought a car, I look at what JD Power has to say about it. I also look at publications like Motor Trend. Car companies pay JD Power to be included in their product testing. Motor Trends is a press outlet, so car companies don’t pay them, but they do loan vehicles to them for testing. JD Power and Motor Trend test products from other companies and report on the results because that is their business and they can make a profit doing so. That’s why research companies do product testing for companies like HP.

These studies help us understand what customers do and do not like about our products, and we can incorporate this feedback when we design new ones. Also, many of the studies that research companies do on our behalf are not published or used for marketing claims. Often we just want to know what consumers think about us so that we can better address their printing needs.

Opinions expressed here and in any corresponding comments are the personal opinions of the original authors, not of HP and may not have been reviewed in advance by HP.