WHAT DISTINGUISHES A GOOD IDEA FROM A BAD ONE?

The critical factor is the quality of your insight - a deep and vivid understanding of your consumers’ unmet needs, and your capacity to turn insights into ideas.

Innovation cycle times are reducing, startups are shaking up the rules, digital and e-commerce is changing expectations of what brands should deliver, in the blink of an eye.

The implications? You need to not only spot great insights, but they also need to provoke ideas that you can act on quickly.

Techniques such as design research, design thinking and agile sprints combine insight and ideation methods to help you do just that.

PAUSE AND REFLECT ON WHAT YOU KNOW ALREADY

It's tempting when you start a new innovation project to dive into a program of new consumer research.

However, few people have the luxury of kicking off a major research effort, and even if you do, don't, at least to start with.

The chance is you have a ton of past research reports stored in the cloud gathering digital dust - right?

Dust them off and mine them for fresh insights, perspectives, and opportunities.

You'll be astonished what you uncover. Often a study commissioned for one purpose will yield unexpected insights for a different business challenge.

For a recent digital marketing project, we reviewed over 20 past research reports, identified common themes which became the springboards for strategic opportunities and the focus for new customer marketing initiatives.

Over the years we've found this technique to be really valuable, especially when you get different folks to assist you - who all have a different viewpoint.

It unlocks overlooked opportunities.

Categorise your findings into two buckets: firstly, what you know for sure - i.e. the actions to take now (improve the product formula, packaging experience, reframe the benefits etc.) - and secondly, hunches and knowledge gaps to explore further.

The 'act on now' become your quick wins to execute on now.

KNOWLEDGE GAPS

At this point, you will have a much sharper set of questions to investigate, and you'll be more productive in your enquiry.

Prioritise your knowledge gaps. You may need to spin out a more comprehensive online survey or dig into your analytics to identify possible attitudinal or behavioural drivers.

Once this is done, get creative with how you take you insight discovery to the next level.

BE CREATIVE WITH INSIGHT DISCOVERY

Be creative in the conversations you have with your consumers to liberate surprising insights.

Most popular market research methods (focus groups, surveys) produce generalisations and truisms: be faster, more convenience, more personalised. Such insights lack any context, penetrating depth and are unhelpful for innovators.

If Guinness had listened to their market research, they would have made it quicker to pour rather than celebrating 'Good things come to those who wait'; Apple would have focused on bytes, RAM and speed, not creativity, delight and design.

Case study

Innovating in food is challenging. To help a client redefine healthier eating – and avoid the innovation conventions in the category – we ran co-creation workshops with different types of consumers. Firstly we explored the broader context in which food played a role in their healthier habits. Armed with thought-provoking concepts and examples from outside the category we contrasted how other brands tackled similar needs and were able to tease out more contextually relevant and unexpected insights for the client. These were then used as springboards for generating ideas.

Think of this as 'design research'. It enabled the team to step out of the widely accepted norms and challenge the status quo.

PROTOTYPE AND BETA TEST IDEAS

Don't be afraid to use ideas as a way to explore customer needs.

Once you have identified your customers' frustrations with the existing product/service, use a quickly constructed 'minimally viable prototype' to test your assumptions.

By creating something tangible to explore with your end-user you can assess what features and benefits are of value, and importantly which ones aren't. Too often teams jump to ideas, packed with unnecessary features based on poorly constructed insights.

The best ideas are the simplest, based on strong insights.

With each prototype iteration and consumer exposure you learn, adapt and fine-tune your idea.

For example, we do this through simple sketches, 3D mockups or visuals, infographics and animations. Such 'low resolution' prototypes, help the team get a sharper understanding of how to optimise and simplify the design of your new product or service.

TO SUM UP:

• Don't kick off any new consumer research until you have thoroughly mined your existing research studies for opportunities, and prioritised your knowledge gaps

• Spin off any quick wins and obvious fixes for customer needs and frustrations

• Combine quantitative studies with more creative insight techniques. It will result in a more profound understanding and empathy.

• Use beta testing to further identify what matters and is of value to your target audience.