We have blogged in the past about engaging specialist users in research: engaging individuals whose lifestyle, usage requirement, or relationship to a category uniquely positions them to better inform research.  I’ve always thought of these lead users as most valuable for innovation.  But then I saw this article on how insurance provider Aviva has engaged its most influential customers to hone its product offerings AND its ads.

The company created an online community to better conduct quick-turnaround, lower-cost research, and used that opportunity to identify “expert consumers” who are knowledge and influential about the industry and scrub them in more specifically to the research process itself.  This process has turned Aviva’s community into a wonderful tool for relationship building and a source of quick and informed opinion on products and communications.

Aviva’s case profile seems to again confirm what many have found over the years: the more you know the source of information, the better that information can be.  For example, we’ve talked before about how social media’s anonymity undermines its ability to provide true customer insight.  But we have seen companies like Southwest Airlines and NASCAR unleash insights from social media by finding or building communities where they know the participants.

Identifying true lead users can be difficult; it’s hard to find lead users in nature, so defining a screener is imperative.  One appliance company we work with found success by leveraging external networks to generate a screener that would reveal truly leading consumers.  We have also seen companies like Visa and Charles Schwab engage consumers on a long-term basis through research by creating joint-benefit research projects or creating a shared agenda. 

Are you fostering long-term relationships with customers through research projects?  Do you see the benefit of identifying and engaging “expert consumers”?  We’d love to hear about it in the comments section below.

Related Blogs:

• Lego’s Building Blocks of Innovation
• Social Media-Listening to the Right Buzz
• 3 Steps to Customer-Focused Innovation
• Right People, Right Question is the Mantra of Open Innovation

Related MREB Materials:

• Creating a Specialist User Screening Process
• Passionate Communities: Using Engaged Customers to Get More from Social Media
• Using Engagement Strategies to Increase Research Participation

Guest blogger Corey Mull is a researcher with the Marketing Leadership Council, a sister program of the Market Research Executive Board.

According to some, the world is in a state of stagnation when it comes to innovation. Last year, in reaction to that, I asked if there weren’t still pieces of low-hanging fruit in management – are there things that innovation processes don’t consider? Places managers don’t look for innovative ideas?

We’ve noted that ideas and products that derive from customer-focused innovation processes are most likely to survive and succeed in the marketplace, so part of our recently-launched Marketer’s Playbook (which anyone at a company with an MLC membership can access using the same username and password you use for the MREB site) is a section on innovating with customers in mind . We think if you can convincingly cover all three of these bases, you’ll be well on your way to creating great, consumer-focused innovations:

Incorporate customer insight. There are limitations to using existing products as a point of reference for insight generation, but companies have seen great success by harnessing the creativity of lead users during the product development process. You can also use existing customers to surface underappreciated needs and market trends.  Surface unstated customer needs by focusing first on the task your customer is trying to accomplish with your product and then on how your customer measures success once they’ve completed the task.

Incorporate employee insight. Your customers aren’t the only ones that should be involved in the innovation process – employees are a great source of ideas about where to go next (as GM harnessed with their intelligence network) , but not in the ways you might think. You need to leverage employee insight and creativity across the organization in focused ways, and establish sensible guardrails to ensure employee-generated innovation stays relevant to the brand.

Build an effective team. Insights from customers and employees aren’t enough; an effective innovation process ends with a great team that turns insights into defensible products and services.

Related Blogs:

• Right People, Right Question is the Mantra of Open Innovation
• Need Innovation?  Look to the Humanities
• Lego’s Building Blocks of Innovation

You’re on a road and have lost your way. What’s the best thing to do? Simple! Ask for directions. Well, it’s not as simple as it sounds. You need to find a person who knows the way, and also need to ask the right question. Otherwise, you’ll end up going down the wrong road again.

The open innovation scenario is somewhat similar. Many companies have jumped on the open innovation bandwagon but find their efforts going down the wrong track—reaping only incremental innovations at best. Ever wonder why your efforts don’t generate breakthroughs?

Well, the Board has the answer. Here are 2 things Research needs to implement to generate truly breakthrough ideas from open innovation:

• Recruit exceptional talent: Some people believe that including a large number of participants would increase their chances of generating breakthrough ideas. However, innovation is not a numbers game. It doesn’t matter how many participants you reach out to, rather it’s the quality of talent that matters. You should restrict the range of participants to select few individuals/firms, such as lead users and subject matter experts, who have the potential to see beyond the average.
• Ask specific questions: Presenting broad topics and expecting pointed ideas is like asking for the moon. Participants feel directionless when they are asked open-ended questions and therefore end up giving average inputs. You need to give them specific topics/questions to focus on in order to generate valuable responses.

MREB members, learn more about this targeted open innovation for generating breakthroughs and how you can facilitate internal stakeholders and external participants to work together.

In “Who Put the Flouwah in my Chowdah?” The Washington Post’s Steven Pearlstein explores two of my favorite topics: regional northeastern cuisine and consumer behavior.  Steven uses his early childhood memories to reflect on why consumers like inferior products, including thick-and-goopy New England clam chowder (which has no basis in historical recipe tradition). 

Authentic clam broth-based chowdah has all but disappeared from popular dining establishments because diners have been conditioned to prefer the thicker, and seemingly heartier, version.  And this points out one of the biggest challenges for market research: how to you identify changing tastes and new opportunities?  How can we avoid just confirming consumers’ preference for the products that they already know? 

Many years ago we wrote a whitepaper on using qualitative research techniques for new product development, and ethnography, ZMET, and laddering are all still used to try to get beyond the consumers’ obvious responses.  More recently we added more high-tech options, outlining how companies reveal hidden purchase drivers using emotional, sensory, and natural observation techniques.

The research techniques outlined in the whitepapers above can help you get beyond the average consumer’s biases, but one of the best bets we’ve found for improving innovation is to think differently about which consumers you engage in the process in the first place.  Identifying and engaging progressive users in your new product development process is a terrific way to source new and different product ideas that will resonate in the market.

What do you think?  How does your organization address consumer conformity to get to those truly new insights?  Tell us about it in the comments section below.

Related resources:

• Impacting the Innovation Cycle with Qualitative and Social Research Techniques
• Revealing Hidden Purchase Drivers
• Customer-Powered Innovation: Co-Opting Specialist Users in Direct Innovation

By Kate Camp

A recent FC Blog post recounts the author’s experience with two different audiences for his creative strategy workshop. The first, a group of insurance lawyers, he expected to offer few creative ideas due to their intense focus on minimizing risk. He anticipated that the second group, comprised of marketing executives for an innovative consumer products company, would overwhelm him with the sheer number of their imaginative suggestions. Yet the exact opposite occurred. The author’s anecdote only confirms what prior research has shown: creativity is not an innate personality trait; rather, it is a learnable skill.

The problem for those of us in market research, however, is that although creativity can be learned, it can also be stifled by the wrong environment. And when creativity plummets, so do the number of actionable insights provided to business partners.

For our  Boosting Insight Productivity study the MREB interviewed a broad cross-section of the membership and conducted a quantitative survey of research staff and their managers. We set out to discover which techniques were ultimately successful in improving the number of insights generated by individual researchers.  The overwhelming result? Researchers’ environment significantly impacts their ability to generate insight. And the good news is many companies have room to improve.

Here are the 4 Key Factors we discovered that drive insight productivity:

• Clarity of the Insight Mandate
• Level of Team Support for Creativity and Risk Taking
• Manager’s Fairness, Integrity, and Openness
• Satisfaction with Compensation

Visit our Insight Generation Methods topic center for more techniques proven to encourage insight generation.

By Anthony Bell

A recent HBR article explains that individuals who study science or business develop the skills to make data-based predictions and assumptions but often struggle to think creatively about problems and larger trends. By contrast, individuals who study history, philosophy, and art are more innovative and skilled at thinking outside the box.  Innovative thinkers are hard to find and are becoming increasingly hard to keep.  When you’re looking to find these innovative researchers, think about three factors that associate with insight-ready researchers:

• Experience in the market research field
• Level of educational attainment
• A personality strongly marked by intellectual curiosity

I bold this last piece because it points to a less obvious, but equally important element of the researcher personality. These are the researchers who ask questions that nobody else does and strive to take conversations (and thought) to a higher level. Everyone believes they are intellectually curious so make sure you have a screening process that involves more than just live interviews. Learn to assess intellectual curiosity here.

As a manager make sure that your research environment encourages this innovative productivity. Teaching insight is difficult due to its lack of tangibility. Smart management focuses on open-ended discussion to drive researchers to discover their own creative instincts and encourage them to drive their own insights.  Once you’ve got research focusing on the right goals, promote a supportive team culture and set concrete guidelines that empower researchers. While data information is the most important element to Research, there’s a growing need to develop the story and create more actionable recommendations. This requires more creative thinking and insight-based solutions. Shifting to an innovative research function begins with hiring the right people, developing the proper skills, building the team environment to encourage growth and aligning performance to the new criteria.

By Anthony Bell

Consider all the screens you interact with on a daily basis: smart phone, tablet, desktop, laptop, in-store video, big-screen TV, screens at sports events, screens in automobiles/ airplanes, and many others.  Total adult daily viewing devoted to watching all of these screens: 8.5 hours (for those age 45-54, its 9.5 hours). That’s a lot of time spent peering at a screen and a great place for marketers to reach consumers. But what about all the marketing communication we receive on these screens every day? Do we absorb them all the same way? Do they stick with us equally, regardless of the format?

According to the neuroscientists at Neurofocus, the brain receives video stimuli in an identical fashion, no matter what the source, but the subconscious responds to video differently in different formats. The neuroscientists identify three primary measures of neurological effectiveness: Attention, Emotional Engagement, and Memory. They find that the second and third are extremely powerful predictors of purchase intent and marketplace success. To tap into these latent emotional drivers, Research should capitalize on innovative implicit research techniques. They also identify three screen categories: TV, Internet (desktop/ laptop viewing), and mobile (small portable screen based devices). Here are some of their findings from their testing of advertisements across the different screens:

• Attention: Attention is highest for most of the ads in the mobile platform. Voluntary attention is higher on the mobile platform because the smaller screen size requires more focus to understand the message.
• Emotional Engagement: The larger screen sizes of TV help the human elements (human faces) shown in commercials to have the highest emotional engagement. The mobile platform has lower emotion due to its smaller screen size, which does not clearly depict human faces and other emotional elements in commercials.
• Memory Retention: The mobile and internet environments give a significant boost in memory retention. This benefit derives from the intense need to focus voluntarily on the smaller screen.
• Purchase Intent: Both TV and mobile screens – where focus is on video without distracting elements – motivate viewers very well.
• Overall Effectiveness: Ads with high dynamism, fast paced action, and banner-like messaging treatments perform best in the internet setting

Our conversations with various neuroscience experts points to a regular theme: the brain will only afford your message a brief window of time to gain its notice. Therefore, it’s critical that messaging be well crafted to grab the attention of the subconscious. MREB Members, for more, here’s an overview of emotional, sensory, and natural observation techniques.

Let’s say you’re a leading consumer brand, and you’re looking for customer feedback during the NPD process. What do you ask, and how do you ask it? Who are you asking – is it the median user, or a brand passionate, a lead user? Do you go to your potential customers in the end, asking them their opinions on superficial aspects of the new product, or do you involve them from the beginning? For most companies, the answer is simple – customer involvement in the NPD process is a box to check after principal product development is complete, and the people asked for feedback are representative of the mass market.

But if you do nothing in the NPD process but play to the mass market, is there any innovation going on at all? The most innovative products challenge established norms and present such an alluring value proposition that the market adapts. Of course, it’s hard for established brands to radically shift market expectations while retaining brand equity. But what makes Lego’s Consumer-Led Innovation Teams so great is that the program harnesses the best ideas of their most innovative and influential customers, all while reinforcing their brand advocacy.

Lego’s problem was that, due to a wide gap in enthusiasm between median and lead users, their mass-market focused NPD process was spitting out bland, low-risk products that alienated the (quite serious) Lego enthusiast community. The stagnation led to a lull in sales – why upgrade your Legos, if the new ones don’t do anything cool?

The company attacked this problem by shifting their consumer involvement strategy in a refresh of their Mindstorms robot kit: where median users once gave binary feedback about already-developed new products, lead users would now give open-ended feedback at earlier stages in the NPD process. Lego engineers now work directly with brand enthusiasts – who are sometimes engineers themselves – and incorporate those learnings into even the early stages of the innovation process.

Of course, there are other benefits to giving Lego geeks the honor of a lifetime. Giving people that kind of access results in seriously shoring up brand advocacy among the enthusiast community, with members of the user panel actively promoting the new product in online forums and in-person meetups.

MREB members can check out the full case here. But I can hear some of you out there objecting: “Of course Lego can assemble a smart panel of geeks to give the company innovative ideas for free. That would never work in our business.” And maybe you’re right. Clearly, the degree of success that Lego had in involving lead users had a lot to do with the nature of the product – it’s a lot of fun, it enables creativity, and people have generally good memories of it from their childhood.

But here’s something I fervently believe: if it exists, there are people who take it quite seriously on the internet. Even a surface examination of social networks, forums and blogs will reveal people with the most obscure interests – and I’m willing to bet that, even if you sell industrial sealants or embedded systems, you’ll be able to find a good number of lead users/enthusiasts to boost your innovation efforts.

MREB members, for more on innovation and ideation, check out our topic center, as well as the rest of our work on involving leading customers in NPD.

A recent HBR article outlines how the mayor of Lima designed a unique, modular hospital system to address high mortality rates and accommodate impoverished citizens.  Peruvians have learned how to innovate on a tight budget: using their understanding of customer behavior and needs to create appropriate products and services, the country has seen steady growth in the last few years.

Companies can learn a valuable lesson from the Lima hospital example. As the HBR article explains, one of the main reasons for Peruvians’ economic success is that they understand how perceptions of value differ across different market segments and geographical locations. And, as we know, business decisions like building a successful pricing structure work better when based on an understanding of real value to the customer.

With Market Research working to help decision makers understand customers’ behavior and latent needs, your company can generate long-term growth through “intelligent” innovation and investment decisions.  And for B2B companies, this means working with customers and users to source new ideas.  Recent observations we’ve had in the healthcare industry include:

• DietBet-New Website lets (weight) losers put their money where their mouth is
• Geriatric ER-The emergency room experience retools for elderly patients
• Banning Smokers as Hiring Policy-Employers reach into private lives with “no smokers” hiring bans
• Future Foretold by Your Gene Code-Analyze this: Gene reading is the new predictive science
• Indian Doctors Media-Communication without borders: Indian doctors take to the media
• Big Hospitals in Small Towns-Big hospital chains in India eye small town business

By Anthony Bell

Innovators inevitably face challenges getting their ideas to bear fruit. This blog outlines nine ways that innovators can test their ideas and gain confidence in their innovation decisions. These simple tasks are diagnosing tools to better extract information and ensure you make the right business decision. Here are a couple of quick to do’s:

• Talk to a prospective customer to get their perspective. A Co-opting approach like talking to perspective customers gets you a valued viewpoint that you might not have been thinking about. Customer co-creation goes beyond traditional interpretation means and really pushes ideas. Use a structured process to co-opt consumers from the earliest stages of innovation.
• Go to where prospective customers might hang out and watch them for an hour. Observational research techniques, like studying prospective customers provide research with real-life immersion events that we try to simulate for business partners. Learn how your product feels not just what it looks like with customers. We’ve also seen companies invite specialist users into workshops to discover those latent needs of consumers.

Every research team strives to be more innovative.  Product development and innovation decisions are formed by customer understanding, which is the responsibility of Market Research. From trend identification to product launch, research plays a vital role in focusing R&D on high-priority customer needs. Be proactive by identifying and prioritizing customer needs in order to deliver innovative solutions. The more organized your research team is the more effective you can be in the early stages of product innovation. Innovation is only as strong as the confidence backing those new ideas. Research can help confirm or refine innovation decisions by identifying and assessing the best innovation opportunities, bringing in specialist users who have the ability to collaborate in innovation efforts, and test concepts with existing and prospective customers.