Five Secrets of Crafting Outstanding Innovation Concepts
Generating strong new product ideas is seldom a problem (at least, not if you brainstorm with us!). But evolving those ideas into outstanding innovation concepts can be a real challenge.
We’ve identified five factors that seem to separate average concepts from the real winners …
#1 Make sure you’ve got a genuine Insight
Make sure your insight really is an insight. Too many are in fact just vague ‘observations’. Actionable insights contain both an element of ‘truth’ and a ‘disconnect’. The insights in our concepts are crafted to maximise their relevance to your target consumer.
#2 Craft compelling, relevant benefits
Great concepts tap into your consumers’ fundamental functional & emotional drivers. The best offer rewards and deliver meaningful benefits both emotionally and functionally. We craft concepts that unlock these differentiating benefits and maximise consumer desire.
#3 Convince your target with impactful claims & reasons-to-believe
Compelling claims and credible reasons-to-believe are the foundations of a great concept. One of the secrets of a winner – is to be selective and make sure they are in 100% alignment with the insight and benefit. Too few truly are!
#4 Keep it brief and make it visual
150 words is a good target – and pictures really do speak thousands of words. Resist the urge to include every claim and every benefit in every concept.
#5 Perfect your proposition with consumer co-creation
Our secret weapon is co-creation. By working with super-consumers we can fine-tune ideas, words and pictures to build your cool ideas into winning concepts!
Not only does co-creation make certain that your ‘good’ idea doesn’t get killed inadvertently by a sub-optimal word or image. It also creates an environment in which your target-consumers analyse and deconstruct your thinking – before creatively re-building and optimising it into a solution that perfectly matches their own personal needs.
We Can Help!
If this all sounds a bit challenging, don’t panic!
We can help …
- If you’ve already got a bunch of ideas you’ve generated in workshops – we can help you craft them into outstanding concepts.
- If you’ve already got concepts, but they aren’t working as hard as you’d hoped – we can help you fix those too.
We’ve a proven track record of building concepts that deliver outstanding results for lots of our blue-chip clients …
Concept Crafting Successes
93% LoS for Unilever Spreads
We helped the Unilever Global Spreads team generate and co-create new product concepts that went on to deliver 93% likelihood of success in US BASES tests
Best Ever for Kellogg’s Kids
We helped Kellogg’s European team craft child and gatekeeper targeted concepts that achieved some of the best new product concept scores they’d ever seen.
7/15 for Nestlé Confectionery
We helped Nestlé’s Czech-based Central-European sugar confectionery team craft and evaluate 15 NPD concepts – 7 of which beat Nestlé’s action standards