InsightsNow!

Brand Strategy and the Innovation Process

One approach to creating an effective brand strategy is to include more strategic insights from researchers. These might be market, consumer, shopper, product or sensory insights. Recent industry reports point out a gap, however, between what researchers think they are able to deliver and what strategists and brand managers say that are given to make decisions. So what makes insights more strategic, and how do you close the gap between the research information you provide and what strategists and innovators need to know? How do you work together as a team? InsightsNow helps you to collect the best information to:

• Deliver insights to help strategists identify areas where product innovation can evolve the brand to gain a strategic advantage.
• Deliver insights to help innovators identify new opportunities for brands -- open “blue ocean” where there is no competition and innovations have the best chance for success.

Behavior Driven Innovation is a lens through which you can focus the innovation process.

Behavior Driven Innovation (BDI) is a lens through which you can focus the innovation process. BDI builds knowledge with research about behaviors which consumers seek fulfillment. It helps you understand how your brand is connected to consumers on an emotional level. Unfortunately today, “new and improved” products alone don't motivate consumers to change behavior. A behavior-driven approach works over the long term as the brand evolves through many iterations. Each iteration focuses on the changing consumer, discovering new and different ways to fulfill important, yet unfilled jobs for them. Researchers, strategists and innovators work together as a team to evolve the brand and build consumer connections based on a growing body of knowledge.

Using the Behavioral Pyramid to Generate Behavioral Insights

The Consumer (Behavioral Drivers): At the bottom of the pyramid are consumer qualities such as demographics, goals, standards, attitudes and ideals that ladder up to characterizing behavioral tendencies.

The Context of Use (Behavioral Tendencies): These tendencies form based on the context of where, when and with whom people encounter products. By profiling consumers on context of use, you can segment consumers by behavioral tendencies and characterize each segment on the basis of behavioral drivers.

The Experience (Emotional Context): Context is critical to understanding the consumer experience – the emotions, perceptions and pleasures. By examining experiences in context we can link concerns and expectations to perceptions, pleasures ands emotions.

The Behavior (Why and How to Elicit Behaviors): Now that we’ve linked expectations to experiences, we can gain a deep understanding of why consumers behave as they do and strategically consider opportunities to change consumer behaviors in favor of the brand.

Holistic Research Design Yields Strategic Insights

Once the right information gaps have been identified, you can use our BDI approach to design the right research. BDI takes a holistic approach using three basic types of design.

• Experiential -- use in Design or Development Phases of the innovation process to answer questions about how all aspects of the product, such as the name, package, feature, functions and sensory qualities interact to form a complete consumer experience and achieve emotional impact.
• Moments of Truth – use in Discovery, Scoping and Design Phases to generate information about how the different Moments of Truth, such as shopping, consumption / usage, preparation / application contribute to the consumer’s experience and emotions as expectations are confirmed, surpassed or upset.
• Context of Use – in the Discovery Phase, Context of Use research answers questions about behavioral tendencies and the underlying behavioral drivers. Understand the impact that various Context of Use scenarios, such as the who, where, when and how impact the experience.