10 Strategies for Bringing Structure to Ideations

The ideation session by nature can be a free wheeling event: ideas flowing, brains-a-stormin’ and creativity pouring forth. Yet, working without a net, the ideation session can be a very confusing affair – worse yet: a highly unproductive mish-mash. Lots of post-it notes and easel pad sheets with indistinct scribblings, but not many concrete solutions.

So while the goal might be unleashing unbridled creativity, it’s advised to meticulously plan for every eventuality – recognizing that ultimately serendipity and unexpected lightening strikes of genius are most likely to occur within well-defined spaces. A rigorous approach to ideation allows for productive detours: never straying too far afield, nor feeling bound to the illusionary safety of the well-worn path. Innovation and process, afterall, share a healthy respect for rigor with an equal contempt for falling into the trap of foolish consistency.

So, in the spirit of creative process, here are 10 strategies and tactics to help bring some discipline to the challenging area of brainstorming:

1.    Pre-session homework assignment. While sometimes a “fresh brain” is best suited for the ideation process, other times we want to start to get the pump primed in advance of the actual event. In the latter cases, a pre-session assignment will get the participant thinking and engaged – and then provide a meaningful “sharing” exercise to help kick-off the festivities. A homework assignment might include a store audit, or a diary reflecting the participant’s experiences “through the eyes of the consumer.”

Integrating Your Retail Partner into the Innovation Process

Challenging line reviews, tighter margins, product exclusivity, fewer incentives, price concessions… dealing with power retailers is more challenging than ever. What can marketers do in today’s marketplace to get a leg up on the competition and gain traction with retailers?

Collaborate!

More and more opportunities exist to work collaboratively with retailers and to include them as part of your approach to innovation. Is it madness to suggest having a retailer be involved in your innovation process and having access to all your proprietary technology, product, packaging and merchandising ideas?  Not in this day and age.

Open innovation is a reality of today. And, including retail partners in the innovation process is critical to sustaining growth. Successful marketers are realizing they need to not only find new and exciting breakthrough products in their product line, but to innovate the categories that they’re in as well.  Grow the pie and the marketer’s own share will grow as well.  This more holistic approach to drive dynamic new thinking into a category is what retailers today are looking for.  They are hungry for exclusive products, new-to-the-world concepts that will drive traffic and sales and provide a differentiated offering from all other retailers.

Finding True Love in the Age of Brand Promiscuity

There are two kinds of people in this world. Those who admit they are brand loyal and those who are kidding themselves.

One of the most interesting aspects of the relationship between brand and customer is that – for whatever reasons one aligns oneself with a particular brand – this relationship also tends to entail a degree of antipathy toward one or some competing brands, in much the same way that people tend to feel allegiance to one sports team and disdain a rival.

Forty or fifty years ago, prior to the phenomenal brand population explosion of the last couple decades of the 20th century, in many categories, there were generally two dominant brands, and to align oneself with one often meant disdaining the other. You were a Coke or a Pepsi person (this is one of the few “us or them” brand situations that survives today) or a Chevy or a Ford person, a Zenith or an RCA person, a Keds or a PF Flyer person, a Johnny Carson or a Steve Allen person, just as you were a Republican or a Democrat.

Don’t Innovate Products Willy-Nilly. Build an Innovation Platform First.

New product innovation – to drive incremental revenue streams, stay ahead of the competition and justify price increases – is an essential part of most business planning today. Many companies are focused on developing an innovation pipeline and pumping out more new products in hopes of finding a few big winners – often an expensive and ineffective approach and, unfortunately, doomed for failure.  Ninety percent of new product concepts die while in the new product pipeline and 75% fail after launch.  But there IS a more proficient way to innovate.

Rather than looking at innovation through a myopic short-term new product development lens, consider developing an innovation platform, a longer-term, sustainable strategy that has true ‘legs’ and efficiencies that dramatically increases a company’s product innovation success rate.

An innovation platform is built on a core theme, technology or consumer insight – that leads, for example, to a new occasion, target user, package, or channel – and using that idea as a starting point to build multiple concepts off the same platform. Ironically, automakers have been doing this very effectively for years – as have high-tech companies – where they develop multiple models using the same common component parts.

Private Label Update: News from the PLMA Show

Despite – or as a result of – continuing retail uncertainty, private label activity is surging ahead as evidenced by never-before-seen statistics. Most recent figures indicate that store brands currently hold 23% of overall market share thus far in 2009. The private label industry as a whole is now estimated to be $85 billion, with much of this year’s gains led by grocery, drug and mass merchandiser sales increases ranging from 6-10%. In large part, innovation and new product introductions are the catalyst for this growth. For example, in the foods category alone, 27% of new items introduced during 2009 have been private label offerings. That amounts to nearly 1,800 products, and indicates a volume for private label introductions which has more than doubled since 2005.

The surging statistics came into vivid and delicious detail at The Private Label Manufacturers’ Association (PLMA) 2009 Trade Show at Rosemont Convention Center in Chicago on November 15-17. As has been the case in recent years, pre-show anticipation created excitement on the show floor, as the positive growth trend in private label offerings continues to drive market share and retail ‘store brand’ sales upward.

It’s Hall about Innovation
For the 4,500 trade show attendees – comprised of retailers, brokers, industry supporters and observers – the ‘new’ factor was in full view. Take the concept of innovation, for example. As mentioned in last month’s Cloverview, the PLMA debuted a dedicated ‘Innovation Hall’ at this year’s Show. Contained on a separate floor above the main show, the Hall provided visitors an opportunity to meet with industry service providers with expertise in technology, software, logistics, market research, packaging design, store management and many other areas of focus. Formidable companies such as Avery Dennison, Interbrand, MeadWestvaco, Mintel and The Nielsen Company each had representation, which suggests a longer-term strategic view of investment in private label relationships by companies crossing many different industries.

Stay Authentic and Look Forward

“Keep Calm and Carry On”— five words, a global marketing phenomenon.

The stunning newfound (oldfound?) commercial success of the retread of an obscure 70-year old British public service advertising poster merits some analysis and deconstruction, especially as the mysterious allure of brand revival continues to captivate marketers everywhere. What can we learn? Plenty.

First, however, some quick background is in order, particularly for those not already familiar with all this “Keep Calm And Carry On” hubbub. In 1939, on the eve of war with Nazi Germany, the British Ministry of Information commissioned the design and production of three advertising posters for purposes of maintaining the morale of the British people once the bombs started raining down – which they figured might make some folks a bit antsy. One of these posters carried a message calling for a stiff upper lip, in a quintessentially British way: “Keep Calm And Carry On,” it read; all type, accompanied by a smallish icon of the British crown. Clear message, no frills.

Innovate and Market Effectively Against Big Brand Budgets

There is not one marketer out there – large or small – who isn’t thinking about ways to be more innovative with less money. Unfortunately, the mid-tier marketer – with a proportionally smaller budget to work with versus the big brand guys – sometimes has to work harder and smarter just to keep pace.  And while no one can outspend the big guys, in today’s environment working more nimbly is the key to success, which in some ways can actually give the advantage to the mid-tier marketer.

Here are four ways to potentially outsmart and outmaneuver the industry giants when it comes to innovation and marketing:

1.    Introduce concurrent systems of new product innovation. The giant brands are so heavily saddled in go-to-market processes that it may take them years to introduce minor line extensions. Launch hurdles remain high, risk aversion is the rule, and truly breakthrough ideas are the exception. Launching a truly new product in a major CPG company is an increasingly rare occurrence. More and more, these big companies are line extending to death, but not offering consumers any significant innovation. By contrast, the concurrent model engages all stakeholders simultaneously in the new product development decisions from the onset of a project to meet customer needs with innovative, quality products of compelling value designed to be delivered cost-effectively and faster than the competition.  In their white paper, “Cost Effective Innovation” Frank Hall and Paul Collins present a persuasive argument for the benefits of those companies embracing the concurrent approach to innovation:

The 9 Secrets of Human and Brand Longevity

Dan Buettner’s “Search for the Fountain of Youth” which was featured in both National Geographic and Adventure magazine about his research on human longevity and his travels around the world to study the world’s heartiest humans, identifies ‘The Power Nine: Secrets of long life from the world’s healthiest humans.” It is a captivating look of the common practices of these cultures and how they sustain life. What’s even more fascinating is that the Power Nine can be directly applied to your brand to help make sure it’s healthy and sustains a long life expectancy:

1. Move. Find ways to stay active. Humans need to stay active. So do brands. Brands are a living breathing entity that are impacted and affected by every day aspects of life. An inert brand is a brand that is destined to die. An active brand is one that continues to understand its place in the global market, it knows its close in and fringe competitors, it understands new and emerging trends that could help shape and evolve it and stays in touch with technologies that can impact it and help it adapt.

Private Label Update: Innovation Driving the Next Wave

As impressive as the evolution from a pure price proposition to “comparable to major branded quality” has been, the next wave of Private Label brand building in the grocery channel is currently swelling and the impact promises to be even more dramatic.

High-level marketing strategies, retail consolidation, and increased focus on comprehensive brand building are driving Private Label to new levels of sophistication and consumer loyalty. Given these ambitious new heights (and in the absence of deep media spending) Innovation – through new product development, positioning, branding and packaging – is now assuming the central responsibility in driving this next wave of driving growth.

Up to this point, the evolution of the Store Brand has followed a steady trajectory, with four distinct waves of development:

First Wave: Generics Era – A strict price/value proposition provides a cost alternative for consumers, but lower cost, sub-standard quality and crude or minimal design development creates an impression of inferior product quality that lingers to this day. These First Wave products are still an important part of many Store Brand strategies, but overall appearance and product quality—while still reflecting value—have improved considerably.

8 Ways for Bringing New Life to the Qualitative Focus Group

The traditional consumer qualitative group setting, long considered the most dynamic and reliable way for marketers to maintain the pulse of their consumer, has lost its’ favored status amongst many consumer researchers – and for a various good reasons. While still a “go-to” device in every marketers tool box, the focus group setting can often feel staged, with consumers increasingly marketing conscious and less candid in their responses. Conversely, ethnography and other in-context techniques have opened a pathway to garnering a more unaffected view of the consumer and thus the tendency to yield more ‘natural’ insights.

Worse yet, some believe that bias – of the moderator, questions, samples and reporting – has severely distorted the reliability of focus group based qual research, and in turn impacted decisions based these findings. Beyond that some suggest respondents  – increasingly conscious of the qualitative process – are further disconnected from their internal “truth.” Despite these valid protests, the focus group clearly isn’t going away – it is simply a far too critical resource for every marketer in order to maintain a highly accessible touchpoint with their audience. This isn’t to say, however, that there aren’t some very simple ways of optimizing the whole affair.

While the process of plucking consumers and putting them in front of two-way mirrors may seem increasingly unnatural, there are certainly ways to make the most of the focus group setting. By employing some smart techniques, consumer qualitative can be more than highly productive – creative moderators and consumer researchers are bringing renewed energy and, in turn, more meaningful insights from this setting.

The following are 8 ways for bringing new life to the qualitative focus group: