Capitalising on true ‘white space’ opportunities in a competitive market is no longer required for growth alone – it is a matter of survival.  There are threats out there to even the strongest brands these days; no-one can afford to get complacent.  Identifying opportunities based on consumer needs sounds easy enough, but so often innovation attempts fail.  With new product failure rates higher than ever, what we need is a well defined process with clear objectives involving the right internal and external stakeholders to help find better ideas and find them fast!

To reduce risk, we need to reduce our reliance on intuitive decision making.  The steps to achieving innovation are easy enough to grasp, but in practice it is easy to lose sight of the details.  So how can we stay more focussed in our quest to achieve innovation-based growth?

My top five areas to focus on are:

1. The Consumer: It all starts with consumers, of course! Each consumer has varied attitudes towards different facets of life (e.g. health, money, family, etc.) which predisposes them towards certain preferences.  We need to understand consumer choice to influence it in the future, how consumer mind-frames and lifestyles impact choice and keep these insights at the heart of everything we do.

2. Relevance: The innovation must address a genuine consumer need.  Consumers are confronted with many purchase occasions, each with a unique set of requirements every day.  Consumers perceptually align existing market alternatives to these requirements to help formulate their consideration set; their choice is then a ‘best available fit’ exercise.  However, the option chosen does not always perfectly align with the ideal occasion needs.  Opportunity arises from this unfulfilled need. I will cover the role occasion plays in a subsequent blog.

3. Differentiation: The innovation must have a recognisable point of difference.  It is surprising how many products come to ever more cluttered market places, with no discernible difference from the competition. The fact that a new product has a particular ingredient or feature compared to others does not count as differentiation if the consumer is not aware of this feature in the first place.  Most consumers are not aware of the inner workings of the products they use and cannot be expected to appreciate what to them may be meaningless differences. Crucially, the differentiation has to be recognisable.  Being ‘new and improved’ is not good enough – originality is paramount to success.

4. Benefit: The point of difference has to be perceived as a benefit.  Assuming that the new product has a point of differentiation, the next critical element is that this differentiation leads to a benefit.  Put another way, it is not enough to be different, the product has to be better. As marketers, we tend to start with the benefits to the consumer and determine what functionality is required to deliver them.  This is usually achieved using studies that understand consumer needs, or try to develop insights based on where current products are letting consumers down. But this isn’t always perfect.  While starting with the required benefit would appear to solve the problems, the trouble is that one then has to design the appropriate product that actually does have a functional point of difference that delivers this benefit.  Many new products fail because they simply fail to deliver the promised benefit.

5. Excitement: The benefit must create enough excitement to overcome barriers to trial and usage.  The final hurdle is that the strength of the benefit is sufficient to overcome any barriers to trial.  Factors such as price, concerns over safety or basic inertia can be major obstacles that have to be overcome.  Many consumers in a lot of categories do not like to take the ‘risk’ of change, even though it appears to be against their own interests.  People sticking with a more expensive utility supplier or a bank that offers little benefit are obvious examples. We have found that when a consumer is genuinely excited about an idea this ‘wow factor’ provides a means of overcoming a consumer’s natural inertia and barriers to trial. Look no further than the iPad – the excitement generated overcame it’s widely discussed limitations and whipped the market into a frenzy.  Ideas that offer a clear, tangible benefit get people excited, in any category.

With these five tips in mind, it is possible to generate a granular-level understanding of what success looks like and prescriptive direction to achieve it.   But beyond this, a mindset to constantly challenge and think outside the square is required to spawn the innovation process.  Companies often find themselves in an innovation decision making comfort zone.  We need to step outside that comfort zone to generate the authenticity and originality that no other brand can mimic.

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