How can a totally unique approach to creating a winning concept ensure your innovation success?
Despite millions being spent on research, 95% of innovations fail.
But how about we flip that on its head, and guarantee an innovation concept that gets the highest scores in database backed tests?
The Iterative Concept Builder by Catalyx is the most consumer centric approach to develop a concept from first principles. It’s proven to help our clients build innovation concepts that translate into millions of dollars when launched.
And it does so by turning concept testing from a traditional consumer test into a highly collaborative iterative building and learning experience between client, Catalyx and thousands of consumers.
In real world situations, the Iterative Concept Builder has helped to turn failing concepts into database superstars by activating consumers in multiple sprints to build each concept element by element.
The approach is proven time and time again to help clients to consistently build database-topping product propositions that win in-market and avoid all the pitfalls of the traditional innovation processes.
It is one of the key tools included in our award-winning Consumer Activation System, which works like a giant jigsaw puzzle capturing consumer behaviour, emotion, opinion and desire at crowdsourced scale.
But don’t just take our word for it…
Testimonials like this one are common for those clients that use the Iterative Concept Builder:
“Thanks to the strong partnership with Catalyx, particularly on the iterative concept build, we hit super strong results (BASES outstanding, BASES superstar, TOP20 PI). I honestly don’t think that would have been possible without the strong partnership we had with Catalyx.”
Global Insight Director, World Leading Male Personal Care Brand
So, how does Catalyx’s Iterative Concept Builder work and how can it help you? We hear you ask…
Well, in mathematics and computer science, iteration is a standard element of algorithm programming to get to the best possible output.
If we look at concept testing it is too often seen as a go/no go step rather than a learning journey, with the agency seen as a supplier of results rather than a strategic and creative partner to aid success.
At Catalyx, we have taken inspiration from the process repetition more often seen in software development to create a highly collaborative approach that takes the guesswork out of traditional concept building, with incredibly powerful results.
Current approaches to developing concepts can be a time-consuming and speculative process – and often time is the one thing a brand team doesn’t have in a competitive marketplace.
Taking the pain out of the process of good concept building
Anyone who has been involved in concept development will attest to the debate, discussion and alignment that goes into trying to craft a good concept. It can be an enormously painful process.
And in a more traditional approach, because the whole concept is tested in one go after all the internal debate, discussion and back and forth, if the consumer doesn’t like the concept it’s either a case of going back to the drawing board entirely or pulling apart the project to discover what went wrong. Which is hard to do, because it can be almost impossible to determine what it is about the concept that the consumer doesn’t like…
Is it that the product promise isn’t compelling enough? Is it that the concept isn’t believable? Is the pack design off putting? Or is the way the concept is written not that appealing? Or a mixture of all of the above?
So, teams try to evolve, retest, evolve and retest to get to the bottom of the problem, which takes time and costs a lot.
What started off as a fast, inexpensive concept test can become an expensive nightmare as the team scrabbles around looking for its next innovation or communication that will help continue to grow the brand.
And the fact that almost all product launches fail suggests something is broken in how the world approaches innovation creation.
Achieve much better results faster than traditional testing with Catalyx
At Catalyx, our Iterative Concept Builder stops all this.
Our approach achieves much better results and faster than the traditional testing process by taking the guesswork out of the process and involving the consumer and yourself throughout to build a finished product concept or effective communications messaging that will work.
We have deconstructed the process of developing a concept – and we embed ourselves and thousands of consumers into the process to help you build the concept line by line, supported by a quantifiably robust number of your target audience every step of the way.
The iterative process uses thousands of customer inputs to enable innovation that people can’t wait to buy. Over five rounds of consumer interaction with more than 200-plus consumers a round, we work step by step to:
- Identify most relevant tension statement
- Then discover the product promise that best solves it
- Followed by the reasons to believe/product attributes that make the promise believable
- We then find the executional elements that bring it to life best
- And finally put it all together to lock in the overall proposition consumers love the most
To help you achieve full understanding of our recommendations, we promise guaranteed outputs at every stage of the process. These include:
- Actionable recommendations – a set of recommendations guaranteed to help you develop the best possible creative material by identifying the directions with most potential, how to improve further, key success principles and the why behind the what.
- KPI Ranking & Rating – statistically robust comparative ranking and rating via stated Purchase Intent and a range of KPIs relevant to a your category and brand.
- Sentiment-coded gut response – positive and negative responses to each idea, derived from emotional response heatmap pins.
- Strengths and weaknesses identification – heatmapping and unstructured data response synthesis to identify positive areas to build on and negative areas to dial down.
- Emotion & Message drivers analysis – identify the drivers of interest (including emotion, response, message) through statistical drivers analysis. These help to guide you to message and tone development.
- And possibly most importantly, a Catalyx/ client workshop at the end of each sprint to convert the consumer reaction into the inputs for the next sprint. This helps to crack what the tension statement should be in “Sprint 1” and collaboratively workshop what the product promise options could be based on the consumer inputs – and so on, as we build the concept up step by step across the weekly sprints.
Basically, the Iterative Concept Builder helps to take the debate out of the “conference room” as it is able to provide consumer evidence and reasoning at every stage of the process at a speed that doesn’t slow the innovation development process down.
It also helps to uncover regional differences early – a product and its messaging is likely to receive a very different reaction if it’s going to market in Germany, the US and China, and the iterative process helps to discover those alternative touch points early on and work out what to do about it.
This removes pre-assumed opinions that can become time-wasting, especially in large organisations, and it helps to blend your expertise and market knowledge with what the consumer really wants right the way through the concept development process – ultimately creating concepts that have consistently topped out databases and won in market.
- To learn more about Catalyx’s Iterative Concept Builder and other award-winning Consumer Activation System tools, please get in touch and speak to our team.