Unbound concept test for Entourage

Entourage are a boutique, immersive experience agency. We build worlds that tell extraordinary stories and create spell binding moments.

Entourage were developing an exciting, ground-breaking new concept which combines interactive role-playing, gaming and film, to bring to consumers a whole new immersive experience at home.

The Challenge

In order to start exploring the opportunity for such an offer, Entourage needed to know where it would fit in terms of the consumer, online/TV viewing behaviour, social media usage, as well as gaming and entertainment genre preferences. These are key for being able to start refining and focusing the offer development.

Specifically, key obstacles for Entourage was having a lack of visibility of awareness/market size of interactive entertainment. They also wanted to test the popularity of potential IP’s for the immersive experience.

Given that virtual immersive experiences are a new niche that emerged during lockdown, Entourage needed to test the consumer appetite for this new product and gauge what price point to go in at, considering there were only limited benchmarks to work from.

Entourage also needed to know how consumers watch entertainment and what platforms they use, which was crucial to developing the software roadmap.

Our approach

We decided that an online sample among those aged 18-50 and with an interest in a selection of interactive films and/or live Escape room experiences would be the best foot forward.

We explored consumers’ gaming, interactive entertainment, film/TV, and social media consumption/usage behaviours and preferences, in order to determine the size and route forward for the new concept. To explore the concept, itself in more detail, and in order to determine a more ‘grounded’ feel for the opportunity, further explanation was also required to aid clarity in the mind of the consumer, in addition to viewing the concept trailer.

When focusing on the concept (following the trailer and description) we asked for overall appeal and interest in paying to participate in the experience at a ‘reasonable price’, in order to gauge the overall level of interest and opportunity.

Following this, we explored the appeal of each format (from a single two-hour long
experience, through to six x 30-minute episodes), what prices consumers would expect to pay for the full package, and how they would prefer to pay (per episode or in full). To provide context for price expectations, we presented a range of typical prices of adjacent entertainment activities for comparison and anchoring.

The outcome

Research gave Entourage the evidence of consumer appetite for their product and now underpins the commercial case in their business plan as they seek investment in the startup.

Entourage have been accepted onto a creative startup incubator program and are in talks with several potential investors. The research validated their choice of potential IP and talks are ongoing about a licence deal for a future product.