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January 11, 2017

Use past concept tests to revamp old ideas and make new concepts better

Market Logic Team

Imagine the following: a marketer sits alone in her home office late at night, working on a new packaging concept. She’s excited by the idea, but also a little wary – has something similar been tried before? What, if any, lessons can be learned to sharpen the focus and make it a winner? She knows full well that in her global marketing organization, hundreds of concepts are tested every day, but how to tap that knowledge and put it to good use? How to learn from past mistakes?

Clients at Market logic are solving this problem with inspirational concept libraries – your go-to place to get a fast overview of all past innovation concepts structured by relevant business filters – i.e. region, category, brands, and other related research results.

Our friends at Newell Brands tap their concept libraries to learn from past ideation successes and failures. Erin Varano, Director Brand Marketing, is leading a brand team responsible for the Graco Children’s product line in the Baby category at Newell Brands. She shares this past experience:

“My team and I spend a lot of time coming up with new ideas, testing those ideas and refining them – in we’ve tested well over 100 concepts in the last 12 months and probably at this point upwards of 200+ concepts. Because we organize and store every single concept we test in a creative library, we can go back and reference old ideas that were tested as the springboard for new ideas. Put simply, we leverage the research we have to hand on innovation concepts to come up with new concepts to test. And we continue to use that research, again and again, to further understand how we can make old and new concepts better. That means taking the time to understand what didn’t work in a concept so you can focus on ways you could refine it to make the concept a winner with our consumers.”

Recently, I went looking for a product innovation concept we had previously tested to improve storage space under the sink. I wanted to recall what the concept scores were, how they tested, and whether we are moving forward with this concept in particular. So, I just went into search the insights platform, typed in ‘under the sink’, and up popped all the findings I could access. Whether it was the concepts scores specifically, the specific comments consumers made in the tests, or a PDF of the full report. This is all great information to have.

It’s very easy to access, and I think the organization is a very consumer-led, innovative organization. It’s key that we are using the consumer insights that we’ve invested so heavily in.”

Have you found new ways to leverage old concept tests? Let us know-how.

 

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