By: Mike Rodenburgh, SVP of Consumer Goods Practice – Vision Critical

I recently read an article citing academic research from Europe that suggests marketing research isn’t fulfilling its potential to fuel innovation. The argument, based on a survey of 921 marketing, R&D, and sales executives, suggests that only a few companies have seized marketing research as a key component of the innovation process in their firms. As a researcher with significant experience in innovation, I find the position presented in the article misleading and troublesome at best.

I fully admit that the marketing research industry has long been seen as the purveyors of “no” rather than the enablers of “yes”. As an industry, our rigorous testing systems and strong methodological biases have placed us in the back-seat of corporations that have a strong focus on innovation. Rather than helping innovation departments create, test and refine new product ideas that actually have a chance of succeeding, our industry has often simply relied on basic pass/fail systems that add no additional insight into a particular consumer problem. These pass/fail systems end up being reviled in highly creative, forward-thinking organizations, causing many brand managers to avoid the entire process altogether.

The problem with companies side-stepping consumer insight departments is two-fold:

1. There are, in fact, excellent solutions using modern marketing research techniques to help fuel customer-centric innovation from the idea formation stage to help generate good ideas; and,
2. Quantitative testing systems, while often seen as road-blocks, offer useful tools for both validating good ideas and stopping bad ideas from going to market. Moreover, if properly designed, these systems can actually provide excellent diagnostic feedback to innovation teams to help refine product ideas for future testing.

Solutions for Creating Ideas

I have often heard from truly creative people that they believe the average consumer isn’t articulate enough to spontaneously identify a need they have that could lead to a new product idea. However, we know from modern cognitive science that the issue isn’t the consumer’s ability to articulate the need, it’s that consumer decisions are often driven by emotions rather than rational judgment. So it’s therefore not the respondent’s fault that we can’t tap the consumer’s unconscious thoughts, it’s the researchers. However, with the right stimulus, approach, and recruiting methodology, classically trained marketing researchers can use new techniques to help create new product ideas by helping consumers tap their unconscious and identify unmet needs. The question for marketers is: how do you get to those unstated needs?

Without making this post about how to conduct good innovation research (I’ll leave that for another time), the primary focus is on using the right tools for the right job. At Vision Critical we use a combination of online community panels coupled with the latest thinking in marketing sciences and human cognition to collaborate with consumers in a manner that encourages them to identify unstated needs without having to rationally explain them. Our investigations focus on the entire consumer context, including: how they make their life choices, their values and attitudes, and how they interact with brands. With a detailed context of consumers, our findings can inform clients in a fashion that drives new insight to develop truly innovative products.

Solutions for Testing Innovation

Marketing Researchers hold an important piece to the innovation puzzle in offering a validation process. After all, the values of ideas lie in the eye of the beholder whereas standardized tests allow us to have a less emotional perspective on our own creations.

As a researcher with a long history of innovation research under my belt, I have too often seen products rushed to market by overly ambitious brand managers seeking to inject new life into ailing brands. However, properly designed quantitative research offers a way to eliminate poor ideas from the innovation pipeline before costly mistakes are made. Furthermore, brand managers can use the validating data from truly innovative products to get much needed buy-in from executives.

The key is to create a system of grading ideas rather than focusing simply on a pass/fail metric. Grading ideas allows innovation teams to identify ways to improve on an idea rather than throwing it out completely. There are likely many diamonds in the rough that never see the light of day because of the common approaches used. When combined with quick and innovative methodologies for diagnosing the good and bad elements of an idea, these grading systems can become a faster and more agile test and re-test process of refinement. Our team at Vision Critical focus on innovation ways of asking questions when testing new ideas and concepts that help dig deeper into the consumer’s psyche and inform us with the diagnosis phase of a concept test.

Summary

When included in the innovation process, modern research can play a valuable role in saving brand equity and money in the long run. Marketing Research can provide new channels that deliver customer insight and ideas as well as a system for testing that ensures only the best ideas make it to the marketplace.

By creating new question types and enabling consumers to co-create new ideas on community panels, we are able to deliver greater overall value to our clients compared to the status quo in the industry. It’s not about spending the most money on a new technology, it’s about looking at the tools we already have and using them properly.a