BrainTrust Query: Reinventing Innovation Processes is About Behavior
Through a special arrangement, presented here for discussion is an excerpt from an article from the Joel Rubinson on Marketing Research blog.
When I was chief research officer at the Advertising Research Foundation in 2008, two big elements came out of an initiative called Research Transformation. First, we must reinvent the innovation process so that more effort goes against creating powerful ideas from repeatable processes rather than ideas coming from the spray and pray approach. The second was the importance of listening to social media conversations so we can hear the unexpected, rather than have a dialogue with consumers that is restricted to marketing research questionnaire vocabulary.
With 80 percent of new products failing and with most of the breakthroughs, according to the SymphonyIRI Pacesetters report, actually being line extensions, the CPG approach to innovation is broken and must be reinvented.
There are five principles, I propose, around which we can reinvent the innovation process:
- It is more important to segment moments than consumers. What is the landscape of consumption situations and what drives choice in each respective moment? To do this, you must have a discovery process. Social media and immersive research are great. With social media, remember that people are talking about their lives in an unscripted way. Social media is not only rich for insight extraction, it is behavior itself.
- Go beyond discovery to quantification. So many in the innovation business stay with qualitative research to springboard into new ideas. Who knows the size of the prize from qualitative alone? You must have a valid way of quantifying this. Cluster moments into segments then profile consumers, not the other way around. Develop behavior markets rather than product category defined markets. This will also give you much more powerful media placement as moments will reveal themselves in digital life, especially via smartphones.
- Uncover cues that signal a product would be what someone is looking for in a given situation. More than half of brand purchase decisions are made at point of purchase, according to my research at Synovate in addition to other well known sources. Isn't that a sign that the behavioral economists and other choice scientists are right about the impact of cues on instantaneous choice behavior? Shouldn't marketing make it a top priority to crack the code on cues?
- How do we test new product ideas with the same specificity with which they were created? If we are looking to address the choices people make in a given behavioral situation, why ask purchase intent, which is not choice based? Get specific to the behavior market and study the choices people make in those situations. Understand the drivers of choice.
- Evolve the measure of uniqueness into a measure of disruption. What a marketer really wants to do is to disrupt the habitual behavior that people have so their new product gets noticed and considered. Seeing it this way, the traditional uniqueness question in concept research is incomplete and inadequate.