Fast Forwarding - Innovation for Cif Power Cream

Slideshow Transcript

1. Slide 1: The Quantitative MindReading Agency Fast Forwarding >> Innovation on Cif Power Cream By John Kearon, Founder & CEO of BrainJuicer Ltd +44 7967 175 621 chief.juicer@brainjuicer.com “We’ve just inherited an almost empty innovation funnel which we need to fill fast and launch at least one successful new product in the next 14 months. The problem is our usual process takes almost twice that long. Can you help?” Unilever’s Household Cleaning Innovation Centre – Director of Insight – Nicky Boud This honest admission and its challenging circumstances marked the beginning of a whirlwind project that would break all internal speed-to-market records and result in the international launch of Cif Power Cream. Together with the brand team, we reviewed the typical time-to-market for their stage-gate process and found that of the average 30 months it took to get a product to market, research constituted 12 months of it [see the table in Fig. 1]. Our challenge was to significantly reduce the time required for research whilst maintaining the very high standards of consumer insight and validation in the process. In fact it soon became obvious that to stand a chance of launching a new product within 14 months, we needed to cut the research time by more than half! First, we explored retaining all the research steps in the current process but replacing every quantitative stage with an equivalent online research approach. The qualitative stages would stay the same but we were confident from experience that conducting the research online we could reduce the concept testing stages from 5 weeks to 2 weeks, the in-home testing from 6 weeks to 4 weeks and the Volumetrics from 11 weeks to just 6 weeks. In total this would have reduced the total research time significantly from 12 to 8 months. In normal circumstances this would have delighted everybody but it still wouldn’t allow the team to launch a new product in 14 months, so we continued searching for more creative solutions. In order to match the timings we agreed on 2 radical research solutions. The first was to run the whole process without any focus groups and to rely on BrainJuicer’s ability to add rich qualitative diagnostics as part of every quantitative stage. The team would then have to rely on these diagnostics alone to guide development of the strongest ideas. This was obviously a huge leap of faith but one necessitated by the time constraints and facilitated by our patented MindReading technology which produces a MindMap of what consumers think about the concepts, what’s behind their thinking and how they feel about it. The second solution was to employ a pioneering technique, called Predictive Markets, which we had been experimenting with as a faster and more accurate early stage screening methodology. Based on the work of Nobel economist Vernon Smith, the challenging supposition behind ‘Predictive Markets’ is that a large group of 500 people, buying and selling shares in ‘ideas’ will be just as accurate as a classic, scientifically sampled research approach. In all 5 of our own experiments where we tested 15 concepts in a Predictive Market head to head with a classic monadic test, we found the ‘market’ selected the same top five ideas with no significant difference in purchase intention. For the weaker ideas however, the market was much more punishing, helpfully sorting ‘wheat from the chaff’. Using a Predictive Market was another enormous leap of faith but it allowed us to test 15 alternative ideas at the very early stage across Europe and get a clear quantitative read on the strongest concepts. Then together with the qualitative diagnostics on each concept, the team were able to quickly and easily evolve the mix for the 2 lead concepts. These two concepts were then tested monadically and the strongest was prototyped and trialled in-home. The final volumetric test confirmed the potential of the Cif Power Cream and the product was successfully launched across Europe precisely 14 months after the project started. ® Fig 1. Comparative Timings; Normal vs. Internet vs. BrainJuicer ® Normal Internet BrainJuicer Funnel & Gate Research Timings Funnel & Gate Funnel & Gate Research Timings esearch Timings esearch Timings ation 20 weeks 14 weeks 4 weeks al screening of brainstorm ideas 2 2 2 s groups to explore top 6-12 ideas 4 4 - titative early concept screening 5 2 Predictive Market = 2 s groups to develop those ideas 4 4 - titative test on the lead 4/5 ideas 5 2 - asibility 19 weeks 14 weeks 6 weeks s groups to develop lead ideas 4 4 - titative concept test on lead ideas 5 2 2 s groups to develop mix options 4 4 - me product testing 6 4 4 pability 16 weeks 8 weeks 8 weeks BrainJuicer® Ltd – 77 Oxford Street – London – W1D 2ES - Tel +44 7967 17 56 26 / Fax +44 1223 46 14 60 Page 1 of 2
2. Slide 2: ept / packaging testing 5 2 2 metrics (STM) 11 6 6 TAL 12 Months 8 Months 4 Months As our Unilever client said, “In less than a year and a half, we’ve gone from an almost empty funnel to a full one, launched an exciting new product and broken every internal speed to market record we’re aware of. It’s quite an achievement. Thanks”. Cif Power Cream is performing well in the market and regarded as a company success. Page 2 of 2 BrainJuicer® Ltd – 77 Oxford Street – London – W1D 2ES - Tel +44 7967 17 56 26