Innovation: Using Consumer Insights for Idea Generation

Getting a new product to market takes a lot of time, a lot of steps and a lot of people pulling in the same direction. Formula development, packaging, operations, pricing - the list runs long. But none of that starts until you have an idea in the first place, and there's more than one way to get there.

Generating ideas starts with a spark, some kind of topic to get the juices flowing.  Those can be things like a technology platform, looking at a different category for inspiration or the various ways a product can be used.

Those are just some of many possible approaches to brainstorming, and each one gives your team a different angle to think from. But you should also be using consumer insights for idea generation. It surfaces what your consumer needs or wants, something the other approaches can miss entirely.

You Need More Ideas Than You Think

Going from idea to in-market launch is a long, uncertain road, and you don't know upfront which ideas will make it and which ones won't. That's exactly why you need volume. A handful of promising ideas isn't enough insurance against the ones that won't survive R&D, won't clear leadership, or won't resonate with consumers once you test them.

Brainstorming sessions are the classic way to generate that volume, and they can run a few different ways. In-person, facilitated sessions guide a group from raw ideas to fleshed-out concepts to a narrowed list, all in the same room. Depending on the objective, that can take an hour or two, or stretch across a couple of days.

Virtual, on-demand brainstorming is another approach. The group gets the assignment along with any parameters to stay inside, then each person spends time brainstorming on their own and submits ideas by a deadline. It's useful when it's hard to get a team in a room together, and it lets people brainstorm on their timeline when they have the energy and creativity for it. The tradeoff is that it's harder to build on someone else's idea in real time, though tools like Slack help close some of that gap, since people can see what others posted and build on it later.

Whichever format you use, you should walk away with hundreds of ideas. Some will be wildly out there, some will be safe and close in, but it will give you a good starting point.

Where the Creativity Spark Comes From

Every brainstorming session needs something to point the thinking in a useful direction, otherwise you end up with a lot of ideas that are not anchored to an objective. The spark can come from a few different places, and the right one depends on your goal.

One option is looking outside your own category. What has another category or industry done that could translate to yours? Two-in-one shampoo and conditioner is a good example. The innovation there wasn't a new ingredient, it was combining two steps into one for the sake of convenience. That same lens, combine two things people currently do separately, can spark ideas in a category that has nothing to do with hair care. What that looks like in food is a condiment brand that combines ketchup and mayo into one bottle.

Another option is starting with a technology platform your company already has and brainstorming every way it could be used. A third is looking at how your existing product actually gets used, which sometimes points you toward a different size, shape or use case altogether. Arm & Hammer baking soda is a textbook example. Originally a baking ingredient, it also kept the refrigerator smelling fresh, and that use eventually turned into new products built around it.

Whatever the source, consumer insight should still run underneath it. An idea built off a technology platform, for instance, is only worth pursuing if it actually solves something for the person buying it.

Using Consumer Insights for Idea Generation

However, a consumer insight can also be the starting point itself, not just the filter you run other ideas through. That usually means beginning with an unmet need and brainstorming what could meet it. "I want to eat healthy, but I don't know how" is a real example of a jumping-off insight, one that could spark a whole range of products aimed at different pieces of that problem.

Olly vitamins is a good illustration of what this looks like in practice. Most vitamin brands organize around the nutrient like Vitamin C, Vitamin D, magnesium or calcium, then offer varieties based on dosage. Olly built around a different insight entirely, that consumers don't always know what each vitamin actually does, and what they're really shopping for is a solution to a specific need, like sleep or immunity. Naming the product by the need instead of the ingredient wasn't a formulation breakthrough. It was a positioning one, built entirely on understanding the consumer.  Even within sleep Olly has Extra Strength Sleep, Muscle Recovery Sleep and Immunity Sleep to name a few – all around the insight that consumers want the benefit from the vitamins translated for them, not have to figure out which vitamin will solve their problem.

The Insight – It’s Not A Fact

What made that example work was starting from an actual insight, not just a fact. This distinction matters because it's easy to confuse the two, and only one of them is useful for brainstorming.

A fact is something you observe:

• she buys face wash

• she buys cosmetics at Target

• she washes her hair every day.

All true but flat. It doesn't tell you why and why is where the ideas live.

An insight goes underneath the fact to the motivation.

• I feel defeated when my skin care routine doesn't give me the skin I see in ads.

• I am frustrated trying every brand of skin care searching for beauty and never feel like my skin looks like it's supposed to.

Now you have something to build on, because you understand what's truly driving the behavior, not just what the behavior is.

You don't always need to commission new research to find insights like these. A lot of what you need is probably already sitting in research you've paid for and filed away. If you want more information on how to do this, check out the blog, How to Easily Find New Insights from Old Research Studies. It's worth checking what you already have before you assume you need a brand-new study.

Here's an example of how this played out with a restaurant client. The team needed new menu ideas but had no budget for new research. There was, however, plenty of recent historical research already sitting in the archives on this consumer target. Mining it meant looking at each old report through a different lens and pulling out a fresh set of findings, then grouping them by theme and phrasing each one in a way that would spark brainstorming. A day-long, facilitator-led session used those insights as the jumping-off point, and the team walked away with several hundred menu ideas to take back and evaluate, all without new research.

Summary

Every new product starts with an idea, and the best ones rarely show up by accident. Cast a wide net for volume, come at it from more than one angle so you don't just land on the obvious, close-in ideas, and let consumer insight run underneath all of it, even when it's not where you started.

In the next blog, we’ll cover what happens once you have all those ideas piled up: how to narrow them down to the ones worth pursuing.