Uncovering Consumer-Led Innovation Spaces

A globally leading beverage organisation approached us wanting to define the future innovation strategy for several of their global brands. The challenge being, that they wanted to gain a global view representative across their markets, but quickly. They also sought a new approach; one which might show them something new, rather than the previous results of claimed usage from consumers. That’s where digital came in – providing a window into consumers’ real lives, and able to conduct research across markets, at speed.

We conducted a 2 part programme to define the innovation strategy for the brands:

• Part 1 – Where to Play: Identifying the consumer-led moments of opportunity to target for growth
• Part 2 – How to Win: Uncovering the innovation levers to pull upon to win with consumers in those moments

We took a multi digital data analytics led approach to this project. In total we analysed over 450K social media posts and product reviews, and over one billion consumer searches, to ultimately define Where to Play and How to Win for the brands. This approach covered not only in-category data, but also adjacent category data, in order to identify pockets of opportunity from within and outside of the core category. This allowed us to reveal opportunity areas to protect, and stretch opportunity areas to target for incremental growth.

Part 1 – Where to Play: Uncovering consumer-led opportunity spaces

• Search Data: We analysed Search engine data to understand the growing in-category and adjacent category trends uncovering: what are consumers curious about, and which brands are rising in interest? Search data is a powerful window into the private thoughts and topics consumers wish to discover more about.
• Social & Reviews Data: We also analysed Social Media Posts and Product Reviews to uncover emotional needs and moments of consumption, to define consumer-led opportunity spaces. Consumer posts on social and reviews are where we hear consumers talk about the use-cases for the products and how they fit into their everyday lives; where are they when they are drinking, who are they with, what emotional need are they looking to fulfill?
• Prioritised Opportunity Areas: From the digital data, we created a set of scores in order to prioritise the consumer moments; across momentum, competitiveness, and brand ability to play. Using these analytical scores, and a series of strategic workshops with the core team, we prioritised target opportunity spaces, defining Where to Play for the brands.

Part 2 – How to Win: Inspiring ideation with platforms for innovation

• We deep-dived into consumer search data, social media data, reviews data and desk research to surface key seeds for innovation. Our approach is underpinned by our Innovation Springboard framework which aims to identify opportunities to solve unmet needs within category and beyond, to remove pain, and add delight to consumers’ experiences.
• Using multiple digital data sources, we synthesized these insights into consumer benefit led Innovation Platforms – we surfaced what consumers are looking for, and looking to avoid, from their product experience within and across opportunity areas. Our innovation platforms were grounded in an unmet need – a way in which the product experience is falling short or could delight further – and detailed the jobs to be done to fulfill that unmet need

Ultimately we delivered an Innovation Playbook on Where to Play and How to Win, detailing the key consumer insights from start to finish: Which moments of consumption and emotional needs to target, and which innovation levers to pull upon for innovation ideation. This set a clear direction for the brands to follow to create their upcoming innovation pipeline across product, experience and communications.

“It’s raising the bar for us in terms of how we approach innovation”

Our digital approach to innovation has helped our client unleash the power of digital consumer-data, and has allowed them to prioritise growth opportunities across global and local brand portfolios.

We have also embedded a living tool to allow insights teams to interrogate rising trends from search, social and reviews data – allowing our client to stay on top of emerging consumer-led opportunities now and in the future