When I worked for a certain beverage company
and Pepsi, the competition,
tested a new product,
we would buy pallets full of
product
before it even hit the store floor.
We’d then tear the product
apart in labs
and ship it
to co-workers across the world.
Pepsi’s sales would spike
in these locations
but they weren’t real sales.
They were,
as Robert McMath calls them in
What Were They Thinking?
(a must read for any product developer)
Falsies.
The more shelf stable a product is,
the bigger the magnitude of the falsies.
If you’re using test markets
to judge sales potential,
make sure they are real sales.