When a consumer product company wants to know how a new product or new marketing campaign will perform, it doesn’t rely solely on traditional market research surveys. It goes to test markets. It’s the right way to discover how the innovation will go over in real market conditions, without the risk of a national or global rollout. It also provides the test bed for optimizing the marketing mix to support the full-scale launch. Actual market experience, veteran marketers will tell you, never quite matches the results of quantitative and qualitative market research reports and what consumers say they will do behind the two-way glass of a focus group facility.