Published 30 June 2018
In today’s fast-moving markets, there are very few that survive and flourish without continuous investment in product or service innovation. Innovation done well is every marketer’s dream. Achieving innovative disruption with first mover advantage and fantastic profits could well be a pipe dream. The big deal is that whatever innovation pathway you choose, it involves risk, resources and the right people working on the problem.
Innovation is a huge technological advantage that can propel an existing product or service ahead of competitors. We see this in pharma or big R&D labs striving for the next patentable formula, device or technology. Think major cancer treatments, or ways to purify water in developing countries.
That transform markets and even society. These innovations have a radical impact on how humans act, think and feel in some way – Uber is a game changer for instance, as is Airbnb, where you can ‘live like a local’.
Often the realm of start-ups who might begin with poor product or service performance, at least in short term, but bring to market a very different value proposition – think what iTunes did for purchasing music.
Involve small low risk changes to existing products and services. These are enhancements that keep a business competitive, such as new product features, flavours, formats and service improvements.
The challenge that business face is how to systematically determine how to go about innovation and what to plan for. We often hear the ‘we tried that before’ commentary, or that the ‘business won’t do that’ thinking, because of the degree of risk required or the fact that this idea failed in the past. We believe in incremental learning and that consumers can’t tell us everything, in fact mainstream consumers are not great when it comes to innovation at all.
A better approach is needed to help businesses achieve the right innovation strategy through a more tailored approach, considering context and circumstances that underpin the consumer needs and tensions and how to solve for these. We need consumer insight platforms or problem platforms, clarity on who the consumer is that we are solving for and the scope of resource and capability.
First, we need to understand what kinds of innovation we are going after. Breakthrough innovation is tough at a consumer research level and needs higher resources, however incremental innovation and game changer innovation is possible. We might even foreshadow some disruption.
Whatever type of innovation we want to go after, we need to start with the consumer or a problem to solve for.
Think about how the taxi industry has changed. Consumers used to have significant pain points booking taxis, waiting for them, taxis getting lost, or not turning up and then there was the safety and cleanliness issues and the payment pain points. Then along came Uber and turned the whole thing on its head, solving for all most these problems and more.
But innovation can also be as simple as a better functioning pack or lid closure (e.g. for little kids open more easily)
Ruby can help with identifying consumer pain points and problem insights to create insight platforms from which to ideate. We can create ideation sessions and tools, we can take you on consumer safaris to immerse in the world and context of the consumer and we can provide creativity with purpose.
We have several ways to run innovations sessions:
Ruby can also help with testing of innovation ideas and concepts. Traditional market research approaches employed to test new ideas is a multi-stage process, but typically engages one or many of the following types of approaches:
The most important angle from a research perspective is who to talk to.
Whichever route we choose, we must remember that some categories are inherently challenging because they are so dynamic in terms of the degree of change and technological impact on consumers. We will need to customise approaches and scope what is possible before jumping in.
We need to take the consumer type into consideration, and mainstream consumers are notoriously poor for innovation research. We need to talk to extreme consumers, passionates, leading consumers versus late adopters. Whilst this might seem counter intuitive, it is the people on the edge who will help us shape the future, whereas the mainstream is less likely to know what they are going to need/use or want in the future, unless a lead consumer has shown them why.
Some of the best techniques to drive innovation are future mapping, scenario platforms and insight platforms.
The challenge for many marketers when planning future products, services and communications is to understand the emerging consumer and their needs, wants and desires for the future. Consumers have a desire to live in the future but struggle to imagine what the future will look like. Asking consumers to imagine the future is like asking them to imagine life on Mars. Everyone will have different ideas, none of them substantiated.
From a behavioural science perspective, asking open questions like this lacks validity because consumers need to:
It is argued that consumers’ emotions and decisions are based on their expectations and fears for the future, and then projected back to the present. Therefore, in working with future tense in market research, we need to frame the future possibilities to help them brainstorm current to future needs and modalities.
Since the future is inherently unknown and unknowable, the challenge is to create several different scenarios about these emerging consumer narratives to uncover the dynamic aspect of consumer change and readiness to change. This is an intuitive process and since consumers are usually unable to create scenarios and focus on the future themselves, it is our job to create these narratives for them based on an appreciation of what has happened and what is rooted in the ‘here and now’.
Scenario planning as a process of structured, reasoned storytelling is a great way of ensuring that we focus on a combination of PESTLE factors relevant to the job at hand.
The key advantage of using a scenario planning approach is that it creates new mental maps of the consumer environment by constructing a range of different narratives about the future and creating a conceptual framework for making sense of all the different factors that can have an impact. It is thus an exercise in bringing order out of chaos, a means of organising the multiplicity of deafening information sources about consumers, market research data, consumer trend data, anecdotal information, news and articles into a form of useful knowledge.
We could be talking about the bank branch of the future, or the streaming service of the future, or perhaps we are talking about the ‘energy’ beverage of the future. Whether we are talking about a product or service, we need to build some scenarios to anticipate environmental and social factors that might occur (based on emerging trends we are seeing) as well as political and economic forces. We also need to be cognisant of differing consumers or customers, groups or individuals with very different views and needs such as we might find in passions, mindsets or life stages.
When working with several different narratives about the future of your world of interest for instance, new developments and information sources can assist in terms of unfolding of different stories or patterns that we can map out for consumers to react to and build from.
Ruby can help here by running a stakeholder workshop to build a coherent framework to make sense of consumer change that will create better validity and encourage a more dynamic and substantiated search for future forethought and consumer insight.
Armed with a set of ‘memories of the future’ it is much easier for consumers to look for ideas and insights. What we mean by this is that when people think they know something they tend to give it virtually not thought or attention, if they know all there is to know about it. As a result, they will push for closure and the creative process shuts down. What we need to do is scope the idea more broadly, allowing people to keep issues and possible open for discussion to get the creative juices flowing.
Imagine we come up four different scenarios about the future of schools in Australia (following the obesity trend, the home schooling trend, digital trend, overseas success ideas and something different and out of the box etc. rather than the current ideas that have been generated in the business; technology, staffing and people, property and footprint, other channels) we could potentially come up with many different drivers of choice and many different scenarios. We could then pick the most interesting for us (from safest to blue sky) and work with those to build true insight.
The figures below demonstrate how this could work and provide examples to illustrate.
The map is made up of two key axes that define four future narratives:
The map comprises of a mixture of dominant trends in society today and those underlying movements that could potentially gather momentum and become more pervasive given the right conditions. The map is constructed on two axis which illustrate the key drivers and these drivers are supported by many examples.
We could also map additional drivers that we might build to underpin the future world map. Once we have the future worlds built, we can then take these into Consumer Co Creation sessions. Ruby Cha Cha has a process called Ruby Espresso which is a co-creation workshop involving consumers, naïve experts, influencers and stakeholders.
The key to a good Future Mapping Session is to ensure it leads to outcomes and actions. You should finish your session with a clear list of things to do, conversations to have and technology to review.
Insight platforms can help clients find white space opportunities based on consumer desires, truths and tensions. A true insight platform is described as a problem definition tool. To become an ‘insight platform’ we need to ensure there is plenty of richness, knowledge, context and experiential information to drive solid product, service or communication solutions.
To understand why this is important, we need to think about how platforms should be derived and what makes for a quality springboard.
To get to a solid insight platform Ruby brings sound strategic analysis and wide consumer experience to the table. In bringing the platform together, we create a problem ‘blueprint’ that can be used in the business in a variety of ways.
Ideally for sessions such as innovation or ideation sessions we would create a couple of platforms or territories, however, just one quality insight platform can be a start point to drive fresh thinking and better innovation and communication campaigns in your business.
Get in touch with the Ruby Cha Cha team. Email us at info@rubychacha.com.au or contact us here.
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