Turn Strong Ideas into Market-Changing Concepts
Great concepts don’t happen by accident.
Your insight needs to be ‘true’, your idea needs to be relevant, your proposition needs to be differentiated.
You can’t afford a single ‘wrong’ word!
But don’t despair, our proven approach to concept co-creation can craft good ideas into compelling concepts – faster than you’d think!
A Successful Track-Record
We’ve helped clients deliver some of the highest innovation concepts scores they’ve ever achieved:
- Delivering 7 winning NPD concepts out of 15 screened – for Nestle Sugar Confectionery
- Delivering a 93% concept viability score in a US Bases test – for Unilever
We can deliver equally impressive results for you …
Crucible Co-Creators Encourage Experimentation
Crucible co-creators are a highly-creative and flexible consumer & team research format.
They quickly and cost-effectively:
- Isolate the most resonant and engaging consumer insights.
- Spot the most relevant benefits.
- identify the most compelling reasons to believe.
- Help you optimise its marketing ‘mix’ to maximise its probability of success.
Whilst every co-creation programme is individually designed to match your own challenges and needs, the most successful Crucibles programmes tend to have 3 Crucibles per market – with each creative co-creation session lasting 2.5 – 3hrs. This can easily be delivered over just 2 days.
Multiple markets can then be run in series as rapid-recyclers to generate globally optimised solutions.
The Crucible Co-Creation Process
In each co-creator session our Catalysts and your team work together face-to-face with Super-Consumers of above average intelligence, creativity and communication ability.
They are designed to go beyond the simplistic evaluation, you’d get in a conventional focus-group. They unlock fresh strategic insights, creativity and unanticipated solutions
The team don’t just evaluate your planned ‘mix’, but collaboratively work to:
1) Validate: digging deep into consumers’ motivations
The first section of any Crucible-session is typically run as a combination of personal-sharing & group discussion. This allows the moderator to make sure your working-insights are maximising both relevance and motivation to change behaviour
Validation aims to flush-out fresh, untapped insights – as well as more engaging, relevant and motivating expressions of your existing insight.
2) Evaluate: super-consumers assess each element of your ‘mix’
The second section of any Crucible relies on great stimulus that allows consumers to evaluate each individual component of your current plan. We frequently use a ‘gallery’ approach within the Evaluate stage, to get a quick-read on which elements are working and which need rescuing or optimising.
Whilst it is always possible to just assess the components of your existing ‘mix’, we would always encourage you to take an experimental approach. After all, there might be a better option you haven’t previously considered – or felt brave enough to implement!
3) Deconstruct: breaking-down your current ‘mix’
The ‘secret-sauce’ of a really successful Crucible is the face-to-face collaboration between client, agency and super-consumer teams. During these face-to-face work sessions, the teams don’t just break-down your current ‘mix’, like they might in focus-groups, but also creatively reconstruct and improve each of the components to optimise it to their needs
Actively participating in the creative sessions not only provides the client-team with a unique understanding of what is and isn’t working – but allows them to experiment with potential solutions and improvements in real-time!
4) Stretch: generate and share their own ultimate solutions
Crucible Co-Creators creatively challenge super-consumers to go beyond current-thinking and generate their own ‘ultimate’ solutions – then summarise what they changed and why into one-minute pitch-presentations that ‘sell’ their thinking.
In this way, they go beyond current-thinking and share their own ultimate solutions – and give the team a clear insight into what the ‘ultimate mix’ would need to deliver to win them over from their existing go-to solutions
5) Optimise: fix flaws, optimise elements AND maximise synergy
The final stage of the Crucible process takes place immediately post-co-creator and comprises a hands-on incubator-sessions with client and agency catalysts working together to harness the co-creator learnings. This allows the team to fix any flaws, optimise the elements AND maximise synergy between all the elements in preparation for final quant testing and/or launch activation
Why Co-Create vs Just Going Quant?
When budget is scarce and time is short, why would you risk challenging yourself?
Well, the simple answer is that if you don’t, you might just be launching with a sub-optimal mix and significantly increasing your risk of being one of the 75% of NPD failures. Whereas by making small timely optimisations in co-creators you could massively increase your probability of being amongst the 25% of winners?
Crucible Co-creators are a quick, cost effective way of harnessing the power of your team and consumers to maximise the success probability of any NPD activation
We’ve also used them to optimise benefits, claims, prototypes and communications amongst everyone from kids & gatekeepers to over-fifties and bodybuilders!
Crucible Co-Creation Successes
Kids for Kerry’s Cheestrings
Kerry had some fun product concepts and prototypes that targeted kids and their mums.
We ran Crucible Co-Creators in UK and Germany to prioritise the ideas, perfect the concepts and optimise the prototypes for both user and gatekeeper.
On-The-Go with Kellogg’s Nutrigrain
We sent Kellogg’s Nutrigrain team out to accompany Manchester Millennials on their morning commute, then spent two days generating ideas and building concepts.
It all concluded with a marathon ‘speed dating’ Crucible session and some seriously cool concepts.
Baby-Boomers for Danone’s Activia
Danone wanted to understand the challenges of active-ageing within the fast-growing ‘Boomer’ segment in Spain, Germany and USA.
We helped them gather insights, generate ideas and rapid-recycle quant-ready concepts in all 3 markets.
Quick and Cost-Effective
Crucible Co-Creators are quick to set up and fast to execute. The typical session takes just two weeks to specify and recruit, plus another week to deliver and debrief.
Even complex, multi-market rapid-recyclers can be delivered within 2 weeks of fieldwork.
They not only dramatically improve your probability of concept testing success – they dramatically reduce your risk of failure in market.
They can even save you money on quant-testing and STM by allowing you to evaluate only your strongest concepts.