If you are looking to generate new ideas and concepts for your business in 2023, take a look at five thoughts on how to achieve the greatest innovation success for your brand or business.
1. Focus Idea Generation on the BIG Opportunities
Before you dive into idea generation with your team, to take a derived quote from Stephen Covey's Seven Habits for Success, "make sure your innovation ladder is leaning against the right wall". Much better to generate new ideas that have the potential to grow an existing $500 million business by 10%, than ideas for a totally new business worth a great deal less. In most cases, these opportunities are probably linked to three areas: a) the main needs (and unmet needs) of your existing customer base, together with any new and relevant market trends; b) that build on the inherent strengths of your company or brand, together with any new pipeline technologies that could give you a market advantage; c) and any potential gaps in the market that are being overlooked by your competition. Read more about how to define your innovation focus.
2. Focus Idea Generation on Fresh and Deeper Insights
Once you have identified the biggest opportunity area for your brand, take time to gather deeper insights and “pain-points” linked to the needs of your target customers. On many projects that we run, the first thing that we do is to revisit “old research data” with a fresh pair of eyes. Many of the brands and companies that we work with, are sitting on huge amounts of data that can still be relevant. The use of “old data” can also be combined with other available sources of market information. This includes “social media listening” where your can capture additional insights from online blogs, community forums and competitive product reviews. This work alone will normally produce the insights needed to inspire initial idea generation. However, if there are gaps in thinking, we normally capture additional insights from consumer observational work or from online depth interviews. To find out more, watch this video on how to identify deeper insights to drive idea generation.
3. Focus Idea Generation on More Compelling Claims
Generating winning claims can be a smart and easy way to transform the appeal of an exiting brand or product, as well as guiding your R&D teams with the development of future technologies. Our definition for a "winning claim" is one memorable promise you can make about a brand or a product's benefit, that grabs your target customers attention and encourages them to buy. So, before you start writing new claims, make sure you are crystal clear about the key benefit of your brand or your hero product. You also want to be clear about the main target audience and the type of language you need to use to "grab their attention". Work hard to be different, but make sure the claim remains relevant and true. As a specialist claims generation agency, our experience is that some of the most compelling claims combine a promise that is both emotional and rational; and that this can be even more compelling if it is linked to a brand equity that is already strong. For more information, take a look at how we write winning claims.
4. Encourage Broader and More Creative Thinking
With a clear innovation focus and deeper insights, you should be ready to brainstorm some winning ideas. But do this in an agile way that is designed to maximise the creative talents of your internal teams, together with fresh thinking from external creative agents and creative-thinking customers. We also recommend that you use smart online ideation tools to engage the creative talents of a much wider team, and if you can, plan and run a well organised ideation workshop over 1 or 2 days, with delegates from different functional backgrounds. The ideation workshop events can be enhanced with direct involvement from target consumers, either by attending the session to provide feedback, or via overnight evaluation of early ideas. In addition to inspiration from deeper insights and trends, creative thinking should be encouraged by using a wide range of creative facilitation techniques and games. We recommend that this brainstorming work is run over a period of 1 or 2 weeks, combining workshops in different locations together with online activities to generate and refine early ideas.
5. Don't Hang Around to Identify the Winners
Finally, don't get bogged down with a paralysis of ideation. Plan and run a thorough ideation process, but then look to get broad alignment to the winners that can be progressed. Our experience is that after most ideation workshops, innovation teams should look to quickly refine and screen at least 20-40 "ideas with potential" with target customers and key stakeholders in priority markets. Copy writers should be used to ensure that all leading ideas are written using a standard format with a similar length, language style, and with a clear benefit and claim that “hits the reader early”. We use an online platform called Zip-Zap Ideas® to randomly screen ideas and we try to include at least two “known benchmarks” (ideas that have tested well in previous studies or that are already doing well in the market). When assessing the results, on most projects, we are looking for 3 or 4 "winning ideas" that are “significantly more appealing” against all ideas tested and against the known benchmark. These winning ideas can then be used to guide future innovation work, testing feasibility and deeper product development work. Check out the following video to see how we screen and test ideas on a typical project.