Ensuring NPD is Right for Your Market Every Time

The consequences of launching a poor offer go beyond simply counting the sunken costs and wasted resources. Reputational damage is an even harder problem to recover from. Brand loyalty and trust are hard won but so easily lost. The detrimental impact is not always immediately apparent. Like ‘death by a thousand cuts’ the slow demise of a brand can come as a result of numerous small problems, each of them insignificant by itself.

The first thing to establish is truthfully and candidly what the current perception of your brand is in the minds of those who matter most. The customers, consumers, and stakeholders. Regardless of what you or your organisation might think, the only opinion here that counts is that of the marketplace. Our approach is to swiftly conduct primary and secondary research to feedback to your senior management team. It is extremely important to know where you are starting from in order to understand what it will take to get you back where you need to be.

Without naming names, a client’s reaction to our recent findings captures it clearly:

“It’s hard to hear but vital to know. The searing feedback about how our brand is really seen and positioned in our customers’ minds is something we must all accept and take onboard, across the business, if we are ever to stand a chance of turning things around”.

Having inadvertently abdicated responsibility for performance and quality to third-party suppliers, by branding ‘Whit Label’ products with their logo and focussing sales targets on unit volumes rather than value to the customer, their reputation and positioning against competitors had suffered significantly.

During our research interviews with key channel customers, one well-known retailer described them as having become obsessed with the “High Low Drug” going on to explain they felt the brand had focussed on achieving high volume unit sales, over and above making reasonable margin. Often referred to as a ‘race to the bottom’ in terms of pricing. A clear sign that something needed to be done to shift their price indexing and increase their Average Sales Price (ASP). We all know you can’t simply increase prices to recover from this situation. You have to offer better value and restore some confidence in your supply chain partners’ opinion of your brand.

How do you find out what customers want and what they will value the most?

The obvious answer is research. However, there is a big difference between traditional market research and the 5-step design research process we leverage to create compelling new product and service offers. For those under the impression you can simply ask people what they will want, and they will eventually tell you, good luck with that approach!

Smallfry’s 5-step process ensures insight lives and breathes alongside every decision-making point of the design development journey.

1. Understanding the world around us
2. Exploring people and their needs
3. Developing solutions alongside people
4. Evaluating the effectiveness of the solutions
5. Testing final options for commercial success.

Empathy is the driver, but it’s important to recognise that “you don’t need eyes to see, you need vision”. Bringing in the creatives to this approach surfaces a world of opportunities that would otherwise be missed by more traditional techniques. By taking care to listen and watch, we can better understand their world from their perspective and distinguish between what they say and why they say it. Body language can play a very significant part here. This is where and how we get a richer insight into their attitudes and opinions.

We like to get out there and into their homes or main locations of use. The real-life settings help to surface both the met and unmet needs. We’ll accompany them during their shopping journey, digital, physical or both, to understand their thought process and spontaneous evaluation criteria. Often, the reasoning behind consumer preferences may not be clear, so that’s what we are there to uncover. We are not the customers, it’s what they think that counts!

Assumptions and hypotheses need to be checked and validated throughout the development journey. Our designers and researchers work hand in hand with consumers and their products (designers shadowing researchers). Ultimately, this facilitates the fastest extraction of valuable ‘actionable’ information. Experiencing attitudes and behaviour first-hand empowers the creatives with the insights to make communicating the relevance of their alternative new concepts clear for all stakeholders to see. Appreciating that not everyone in a decision-making team will necessarily possess the imagination to see how new concepts add value, design communication can focus on how the ideas deliver benefits, along with the ‘qualified’ scale of importance to the customer.

Customers first

Having confidence that you have established what customers really want from your brand, products, and services, makes it easier to focus the team on the most important issues to resolve. All development efforts concentrate on the customer priorities and the most important jobs they want to get done. The Marketing Design Requirement spells out what exactly the ambitions for development need to be. The goal being to enrich the lives of users.

Design is a balance of compromise

Accepting it’s never possible to achieve everything that is desirable, it is important to appreciate the possible options, decisions to be made, and consequences incurred as a result. Our process surfaces the drivers and priorities of a 5-star experience, from the customers’ perspective. Having learned that what people say and what they do are different, we continually check. Each time with increasing fidelity. The 5-stage process encompasses early outline ideas, reviewed against needs to establish effectiveness, through looks-like and works-like prototypes on into fully functioning pre-production samples which are left with the customers for an extended period. Adopting the concept into their daily routine really brings the design to life, evaluating effectiveness against needs, usage, and attitudes. This is the point where we can realistically analyse ergonomic and human factors. But we do need to be there for some of the time, to watch what they do, not just accept what they say. It’s not that they would attempt to deceive us with their feedback, sometimes they just don’t realise what they are actually doing! Seeing is believing.

Ethnography in people’s homes – why observations can be more powerful than what people say.

As part of the process, we utilise qualitative and quantitative methods and passionately believe in immersing ourselves in the world that the design will exist. Our ethnography takes us all around the globe observing, understanding, and questioning how people will interact with products and services, now and in the future. Immersing ourselves in their world to fully appreciate the context of use. Identifying a roadmap of now, next, and new opportunities.

The commercial benefits of this research process are numerous. Ultimately, it achieves a shorter development timeline. We set out to find the problems before your customers do. Failure to catch any issues pre-tooling can have disastrous consequences for returns. Everyone knows the damage this can do to a brand. An example from recent IHuT trials found that the routine maintenance and cleaning of a product, vital for ongoing performance, were not as instinctively understood as the development team had assumed they would be. Trip switch thresholds and warning light sequences were ignored and overridden because the users failed to appreciate their significance. Common misconceptions technical teams can have about their users anticipated behaviour because they apply their own personal opinion of what is logical. If this had not been surfaced, the result would have been epidemic returns and the compounded damage that brings with it.

At Smallfry, we recognise the vast potential that insight led strategy holds. Our mission is to unlock true value for your customers, transforming insight into market-leading products. We are your guide through the complexities of the research and development journey, helping to focus those critical decisions on well-informed sound foundation from insights, concepts and into commercialisation.