Guiding an iconic F500 food & bev brand to re-imagine and grow its global strategy.
Faced with slipping market share, our client had recently completed a brand architecture shift to focus on 3 key pillars. With their renewed strategy, the team needed to fill a 3-5 year innovation pipeline within one key pillar. They called on us to inspire, generate and develop a pipeline of breakthrough ideas.
IDENTIFYING CONSUMER NEEDS
We dove deep into social media ethnography and trend learning across 4 global markets and uncovered three compelling need states within the brand’s focus area.
CURATING RELEVANT TRENDS AND ANALOGS
Next, we scoured Pinterest, food blogs and articles to identify 78 applicable trends from today’s global competitive brands, adjacent categories and “influencer” categories. Our partner nutrition expert highlighted the science and context behind in-depth food trends.
Once in our session, we led the international client team to absorb images, quotes, and video clips to understand consumer trends as well as curated boundary-pushing analogs. Immediately, the team’s thinking was stretched with cases from brands, products and business models that have solved the “core issues” associated with the main need states. To further examine the external perspective and push thinking beyond existing edges, the client team enjoyed a tasting menu that highlighted trending ingredients and taste profiles.
Leveraging the inspiration we shared, client teams in Ireland and the U.S. captured their ideas through a virtual ideation platform. Client team members reflected on internationally-inspired insights and built momentum as they generated 119 noticeably different ideas that were on strategy and relevant to consumer needs.
Small startup-like sub-teams developed business cases for ideas, focusing on “what needs to be true” business model components for strong go-to-market plans, enabled by custom-designed templates.
ITERATING WITH CONSUMER INPUT
Development time was punctuated with consumer input (via iPad), practice “pitches” and coaching to create a flow of iterative development; identifying barriers and building solutions. The best ideas were fine-tuned, as confidence grew in the ideas would make a meaningful impact in meeting consumer needs.
PITCHING TO BUILD MOMENTUM
Robust initiative templates and focused coaching ultimately helped prepare teams to “pitch” their idea(s) for funding decisions via a “Shark Tank” style pitch competition.
"The ways you guys brought so much new thinking, with trends and analogs we had never applied before, led to breakthrough ideas and a full pipeline."
Brand Manager, F500 CPG Brand
Want to transform your idea generation and development process? Let us help you with your innovation challenge!
