It’s not exactly a secret that consumers have plenty of options. And consumers want more—continually demanding faster, better, and cheaper products from brands. There’s steep competition across all industries, and many brands struggle to differentiate themselves, meet consumer needs, and keep up with the speed of culture.
In a world where consumer behavior changes rapidly, innovation isn’t just a selling point anymore—it’s a necessity. Innovation has fundamentally changed how the enterprise operates over the last 25 years. It’s a core business function for most successful businesses. Despite the importance, developing, marketing, and selling innovative products these days is increasingly complex. Even though there is plenty of content about innovation, many brands still haven’t mastered the practice.
It’s still challenging to build effective innovation pipelines.
So, what’s the disconnect?
Innovation is only actually valuable to consumer brands if it drives business growth.
Just because brands have something new to buy doesn’t mean consumers will be interested in buying it. While we can’t dismiss manufacturing, distribution, and marketing-related challenges that all impact product failures, there is one fundamental truth that has the biggest impact on product success:
Innovation must create product experiences that consumers value.
Brands need to create products that people want. As obvious as this seems, it’s not easy to identify the elements of a product experience that motivate consumer purchase.
95% of product innovations fail within a year of launch.
Only 6% of executives are satisfied with their innovation performance.
Lack of time for developing new ideas and cultural resistance to risk-taking and failure are the top cited obstacles to innovation.
Experienced researchers are all too familiar with the gap between what consumers say and do when it comes to product adoption. Consumers aren’t being dishonest—they genuinely aren’t fully aware of why they do what they do, or how they might react to a new product in the marketplace.
With this in mind, Deloitte’s findings aren’t that surprising.
How are innovation teams supposed to develop products consumers want if those very consumers don’t know?
In this eBook, we’ll explore how to take a “back to basics” approach to innovation pipelines—and how your brand can figure out how to make sense of innovation and develop products consumers want.
We’ll cover the art of survey design, specifically to derive the key drivers of behavior, including the product experiences that consumers value and their unmet needs.
This eBook will on focus on understanding the experiences, need states, and perceptions that drive consumers to try, repurchase, and even switch brands. These insights provide the foundation for planning and developing an effective innovation pipeline and can be leveraged to drive in-market performance for all product innovation.
Observation data will always be critical when it comes to purchase behavior. But even when that data is integrated into Market Mix Modeling, no observations can tell the researcher why consumers buy specific brands.
Consumers can only think (and speak) most effectively about experiences. Instead of asking consumers what they want or why they did something, market researchers must ask about their core experience of a product proposition or even their perceived experience of that innovation using attribute substitution.
A key concept behind numerous cognitive biases and perceptual illusions that can affect our perspective. When faced with hard decisions, the brain often takes a shortcut and relies on more easily calculated “attributes” to make judgments instead.
With this method, market researchers can use metaphors to understand what makes a product experience great (or not so great). At the end of the day, that is all a researcher needs to inform the development of the foundational insights critical to a product’s success.
To understand the data behind these experiences, researchers should use a range of survey designs built around numeric grid scales.
These rating and ranking scales allow consumers to indicate the degree to which they “agree” or “disagree” with statements that describe a broad range of relevant product experiences. We can also
To ensure such a survey has both depth and breadth in terms of product experiences, researchers should design their surveys with statement sections around category attitudes, functional benefits, emotional benefits, and brand attitudes.
These statements describe product category-level perceptions. To start, it’s helpful to draft statements along the basic product use cycle so consumers can evaluate as many relevant attitudes as possible. Let’s imagine we’re working on developing category attitudes statements for a vitamin brand. Our brand should explore the following:
Statements that describe the moment a specific product need is experienced. This could include statements like:
“I need to learn how to better manage my health and wellness.”
“I don’t think I am getting all the nutrients I should.”
“I only address health and wellness issues as they come up, there’s no need to fix what’s not broken.”
The moment(s) the consumer first considers buying a product. These can include statements such as:
“I’m always on the lookout for new vitamin and supplement brands to try.”
“You get what you pay for when it comes to vitamin brands.”
“All vitamin brands are basically the same.”
The moment(s) immediately before, during, and after purchasing. These can include statements like:
“Once I find a brand I like, I tend to stick with it no matter what.”
“I’ll only try a new vitamin brand if it's on sale.”
“Vitamins are on my regular shopping list—I’ll buy more as soon as I run out.”
These statements describe the experience of using the product, both for the first time and after repeat usage. Focus on the full experience when developing functional benefits statements. It can also be helpful to follow the use cycle. As we develop our vitamin package, we could explore the following:
The moment(s) immediately before, during, and after using. This could include statements like:
“It is easy to open and close.”
“It has labeling that is easy to read.”
“It has labeling that is easy to understand.”
The moment(s) of regular interaction of the brand. These can include statements such as:
“It has packaging that keeps the contents fresh.”
“It allows me to see the vitamins inside.”
“It has durable packaging.”
Experience statements about what the product does for the consumer. These can include statements like:
“Improves immunity.”
“Improves my overall health and wellness.”
“Provides multiple health benefits.”
Next, we can use statements that describe how using the product makes the consumer feel. Because we are most interested in understanding what motivates consumers, we can develop these statements by borrowing from social psychology.
Which framework you choose is less important than ensuring you capture as broad a range of emotional experiences that are relevant to the product or service category. We can use Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to evaluate some higher-order needs, like Health, Resources, and Safety or Love and Belonging, to understand how consumers feel about products.
Some experience-based statements tied to motivations around safety, personal security, employment, resources, and health include:
“Gives me confidence my health and wellness are under control.”’
“Relieves my concerns about my wellness.”
These example statements can capture the motivations tied to friendship, family, and the general sense of connection to people:
“Gives me confidence that I won’t miss out on important family occasions or events because of health concerns.”
“Improves my mood.”
Finally, we can explore statements that describe the way people perceive what a brand does or stands for. If your brand already has imagery statements developed for communications or equity studies, these can be a great resource for developing statements.
It’s also crucial to assess your competition and understand what key messages they are leveraging so that these can be included in the battery of statements.
“Is a premium brand.”
“Is a brand worth paying more for.”
For our vitamin example, we could use the following and apply them to a much wider range of product categories:
“Is a brand recommended by experts.”
“Is a brand I trust.”
“Is a leading brand that is recommended by people I trust.”
Before you integrate your list of attribute statements into a survey, take the time to check your group of statements for depth and breadth.
Remember, surveys are measurement tools. Ensuring you have the broadest range of experience statements relevant to your product category will greatly improve your chances of being able to successfully derive the behavioral drivers that will inform your innovation pipeline. How one chooses to check their work is a matter of personal preference, but it is helpful to have a basic framework to help with the process. For deriving the drivers of behavior, this framework can be kept simple by checking against the extent and range of your statements.
When it comes to the quantity of statements, there is no magic number to target. Still, it’s best to aim for at least ten experience statements for each survey section. Anything less is unlikely to capture the full breadth of the relevant product experiences.
To ensure a comprehensive understanding of the experiences being explored, map your ideated experience statements against category attitudes, functionality, emotional benefits, and brand imagery for an effective visual tool. With this visual, you can see if all relevant aspects have been considered to create a full picture.
Once a robust list of experience statements is created, it’s time to start crafting a survey.
To make the experience as simple as possible for respondents, break up your survey into sections according to experience statement category—category attitudes, functional benefits, emotional benefits, and brand attitudes. This makes the survey simple for respondents to take and reduces fatigue. You can even survey the same consumers for deeper learning when you use a platform that allows retargeting.
Grid-scale types of questions also make it easy for respondents to get into a rhythm, turning an otherwise lengthy survey into a simple experience. Use importance and agreement scales based on a 5or 7-box. It’s best to use an odd number for questions like these to create a “neutral” option for survey respondents. A 5-box scale is typically the industry standard, and a 7-box scale offers more granularity.
Here’s an example of what our vitamin brand’s survey could look like:
Example 2: Functional Attitudes
When it comes to measuring the drivers of behavior specifically for filling an innovation pipeline, your survey sample must reflect the current market. Ideally, you should build a quantitative sample of 2,500-5,000 category users.
It is important to screen users by their most-often-used brand so that your final sample reflects market share. Setting up your sample this way can help you identify critical category and brand-level opportunities.
Once your surveys are designed and the data is back, your foundational insights can help you determine your action plan. In Part 2, we’ll cover your foundational insights and how you can leverage them to determine highly actionable jobs-to-be-done (JTBD). Your JTBD can help you craft innovation around the key consumer needs and drivers of behavior.
Finally, in Part 3, we’ll explain how to develop an iterative testing plan that leverages a consumer feedback loop to identify the most relevant innovation for consumers and thus most likely to win in the marketplace.
Stay tuned for the next parts of our series!
