22 JOURNAL OF THE SOCIETY OF COSMETIC CHEMISTS two headings, however, I should like to mention an apparent paradox. The marketing manager of a large and highly profitable firm recently pointed out that many of the apparently successful products on sale today are not of the highest quality, yet far better products, launched in competition with them, often failed to gain consumer acceptance and had to be withdrawn, at considerable cost to their sponsors. This man, a highly sophisticated marketing specialist, was well aware of the effects pricing and advertising can have on the success of a product, and he would readily subscribe to the belief that advertising can often persuade people to buy a product once but that, in a free market, they will rarely buy it again if it fails to come up to their expectations. Why is it then that products which their sponsors consider 'good' and which product testing has shown to be acceptable, often fail to sell, assuming of course that they are correctly priced and promoted? Equally is there not a danger that some items xvhich product testing has indicated do not match up to market leaders may be rejected by their sponsors when, had they been put on the market, they might have proved successful? The answer in both cases must frequently be sought either in a failure to define the market for the new or improved product with sufficient clarity or accuracy, or con- versely, a failure to define the specification of the product with sufficient clarity or accuracy to meet known market needs. What can be done in these circumstances to ensure that, as far as is practicable, new products have every chance to be proved successful products? This is an important question to which there is no easy answer. Obviously it is the aim of any firm marketing a new or improved product to ensure its profitability, but experience has shown that only a fraction of the new products which are put on the market prove successful, with consequent wastage of development investment. In this paper, I outline some of the shortcomings of existing research procedures in throwing up viable new or improved products and some views, not too heretical I hope, on the direction in which improvements in product testing may lie. Mrs. Ludford {1) describes in some detail product testing in its use for the guidance of research and product development chemists and has pointed out some disadvantages of existing techniques. She has also given us the benefit of her ideas on the way towards an era of greater light. I think she would agree with me that it is often easier to delineate the problems we must solve than to dogmatise about solutions, but if we succeed in stimu- lating more thought, and, inevitably, the necessary expenditure of more

PRODUCT TESTING IN THE SPHERE OF PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT 23 money in solving these problems, our successors at your next symposium may well be able to record some solid achievements. In April 1959 Ovens read a paper on 'The function of consumer testing in product development and marketing' (2). I need not repeat what he said here as it is a matter of record. Suffice it to say that he concentrated on describing techniques for consumer testing new and modified products. I do not dissent from his conclusions: the methods he described for both single and double blind placement tests are in widespread use today and justifiably so, but in the seven and a half years that have elapsed since that paper was read there have been two developments which to my mind must affect current thinking. Firstly, markets for consumer goods have become increasingly competitive (not least those involving the type of products with which you are concerned), and secondly, most if not all existing brands are constantly being improved by their manufacturers. These two pheno- mena create a situation where it is becoming increasingly difficult to produce improved versions of existing products. This in turn has lead to an intensification of the search for 'new' products, whether they be complete innovations (i.e. products not existing in any form hitherto) or radical departures from the normal pattern of products in a particular product field. An example of a completely new product was the first radio examples of the second are more frequently encountered - thixotropic paint and tubeless tyres are but txvo. CHANGES IN EXISTING PRODUCTS Let us now examine in turn each of the aspects of product development I mentioned earlier, dealing in the first place with the improvement or modification of existing products. Here it is important that everyone concerned (the chemist, the tech- nician, and marketing, production and advertising men) should know precisely what objectives the improved or modified product should meet. In parenthesis I should add that I am assuming that changes of the kind I have in mind do not happen by chance, though happily there have been occasions in the past and doubtless there will be more in the future when the scientist lights upon the key to an improvement in an existing product while engaged in work of a quite different nature. In other words, I am postulating the case where there is a conscious effort towards the desired goal of an improved or modified product and that the end product thus sought will meet specific objectives, whether they be improved performance