We're really excited to be embarking on a new adventure at Brand Development - sharing our innovation skills and techniques with clients through training. We've developed a balanced programme of theoretical and practical tools and techniques to help clients at beginner and intermediate-levels gain a high degree of competence in workshop and brainstorming skills. Our creative tools & techniques have been developed in live-projects for many of the world's leading FMCG companies over 20 years of successful projects - so they've been honed at the sharp edge of innovation! We've partnered with three highly experienced trainers to prepare and deliver... Continue reading

Fascinating changes in the way teenagers are engaging with social media have been identified in a research piece by Pew in the USA. There seems to be a bit of a decline in affinity (but not necessarily usage) with Facebook in favour Twitter conversations. Maybe Facebook need to do a bit of ethnography and work out how to re-establish strong, emotional connections. Perhaps they're so busy playing catch-up on Mobile that they are overlooking the elephant in the room? Continue reading

There are few things stronger than human emotions and Business Week have identified at least one video-to-digital converter that believes that Home Movies, not social media and gaming that could be the big-winners from consumer adoption of Smart TVs. We think they could be right. New technology combined with digital streaming off Amazon's servers could easily be what is needed to put consumers' personal and shared memories at the heart of the entertainment industry. A clever innovation that is reviving and giving new relevance to a neglected medium. It could lead to some really interesting opportunities in hand-held memory capture... Continue reading

It's brilliant to see the lovely folks at Emmi of Switzerland launching some of the new product concepts we helped them develop last year. Continue reading

We are huge believers in the power of Collaborative Team Incubators to accelerate the innovation process and deliver actionable results fast. As a result, we use them a lot. They will never replace a full on-creative workshop, but then nor should they. Incubators are great for turning insights into actionable platforms, building starter ideas into powerful structured concepts, for addressing process roadblocks, even for exploring strategy options and turning them into compelling brand plans. The power of Incubators is their collaborative character. Virtually every "classic meeting" inevitably turns into an opportunity to debate, a chance to demonstrate knowledge and cleverness,... Continue reading

What consumers say in market research ... and subsequently go on to do in the real-world seldom seem to be the same It would be easy to assume that consumers deliberately lie, but it's not as simple as this. We've frequently come across examples of consumers embroidering, mis-remembering or simply mis-attributing their motivations for taking specific actions We recognise the absolute imperitive of getting at the truth. If you are undertaking an innovation programme where you will invest thousands, or even millions of pounds / dollars you need certainty! We increasingly use non-confrontational interrogation techniques where we use disruptive storytelling... Continue reading

We're huge fans of Starbucks. So we were particularly interested to see that they claim to set themselves a challenge based on asking: "if we were competing with Starbucks, what would we do?". this unusually humble approach nicely reflects one of the techniques we use in our own workshops - where we challenge delegates to "put themselves in the other guy's shoes". Regardless of whether this is consumer or competitors - it always works brilliantly. We can't wait to see where they take their strategy of one-on-one marketing to deliver a much deeper experience for consumers. It sounds like it... Continue reading

Nothing fires up your innovation juices like having true empathy for your target audience - a deep understanding of their needs and the compromises they are curently being forced to make In order to build real consumer closeness, one major baby-food manufacturer has encouraged its marketing and insight teams to buddy-up long term with first-time mums in their locality. In this way they gain deep, actionable insights - and inspiration for their ideation processes. We've hear that this process has been so successful, that they have rolled it out to other customer-facing functions - with equivalent success. Related articles The... Continue reading

How do the the people we respect a visionary entrepreneurs do it? We recognise they have many skills, but we cant help feeling that Empathy is one of the keys. Empathy: that deep, almost emotional understanding of how your target consumers live their lives, what they value ... and the compromises they are being forced to make. This empathetic understanding ... combined with a bit of imagination and entrepreneurial arrogance that they understand what their consumers need (often even better than that do) ... seems to be why entrepreneurs often spot the breakthrough ideas long before their better funded and... Continue reading

For the last decade the consensus amongst innovators seems to have been that fresh insights are the foundation-stones of every successful innovation programme However, we've been sensing a growing dissatisfaction with this view over the last few months ... Potential clients frequently already have more than enough paper-insights, but increasingly feel frustration that these aren't stimulating the breakthrough ideas they need. A couple have even talked about moving away from the insight-driven approach in favour of a more instinct-driven, more entrepreneurial, big-bets approach! This feels like a fundamental misreading of the evidence ... Great innovation undoubtedly needs inciive & dynamic... Continue reading

We've just spent two highly entertaining days with clients observing and talking to mums of 7 - 12 year old kids. Quote of the session has to be: "I don't take my kids grocery shopping, that's far too stressfull. I do most of my shopping online. But, my 7 year old will often pick up my iPad and add a few things she fancies when I am not looking". So much for the good old days when pester power consisted of tugging on your parent's sleeve and whining when you didn't get what you wanted. I guess we should accept... Continue reading

We just finished a series of concept incubation workshops for one of our clients. We started with 22 pretty solid ideas for new products. We added 20 highly intelligent, creative and vocal consumers - and a team of 8 Brand Development consultants drawn from marketing, planning and creative backgrounds. Ten hours later we had an exhausted workshop team - and 12 clearly prioritised and massively improved concepts. By rigorously evaluating each idea with our super-consumers - and then re-creating the most promising ideas jointly with them - we not only optimised the concept thinking, we'd really brought the ideas to... Continue reading

It looks like the global "legacy" carriers line British Airways and Co will soon be facing Clayton Christensen's Innovator's Dilemma. Will they choose to compete against the new generation of low-cost long-haul competitors, or just do as they have in Europe - cut-corners and hope for the best? Continue reading

Is the world really ready for Hagfish slime? Perhaps all it needs is a branding and positioning job to make this natural alternative to petrochemical based synthetic fibres like nylon and lycra, or spandex - sound a bit more socially acceptable. Continue reading

Nice to see Google has got a sense of humour. New "launch" for April Fool's Day. Continue reading

There are a whole lot of brand anniversaries being celebrated this year. Maybe it's because there is so little else to look forward to. We loved Ma'amite last year for the Queen's Jubilee, but we also quite like the fact the Diet Coke are reviving the Diet Coke "Hunk" to help celebrate theirs. Whether you love him, or hate him - he is undeniably an integral part of the brand's storytelling history. Continue reading

When Jane Bainbridge wrote her article for this week's Marketing Magazine, she wanted a number of expert perspectives. One of those she chose was our Managing Director David Goudge, Continue reading

Brilliant example of humour, meets branding meets geekiness. Power A have launched a range of Star Wars themed iPhone covers! Continue reading

The typical incubator fund often primarily focuses on web-based technology. Lemnos is different, they back inventors with ideas for new hardware tehnology. Hamburger Robot anybody? Continue reading

In a brewing world where craft brewers are deemed "good" and big brewers are deemed "bad", where consumers are constantly on the look-out for something new or something cheap - innovation and micro-scale have become the key-words in staying relevant. It's encouraging to see how AB-Inbev is using its Project 12 initiative to generate interest and keep ahead of the curve. Continue reading

The UK market for diet foods seens to have hit a bit of a stalemate. Consumers in research we have recently completed for clients increasingly equate Fat-Free with high sugar and therefore less than healthy in the long term. Maybe the advent of "fat-blocking" products like Kirin's Mets Cola and Pepsi's Special (launched in japan recently) herald a new dawn? Continue reading

You could be forgiven for thinking that most of the glamour has gone from air travel. Budget airlines, security checks and airport congestion have all done their bit to take the edge off the thrill of travelling to exciting and exotic locations. It's interesting to see the energy that a few leading airlines have put into keeping the glamor of flying alive - at least for a favoured few: their first class passengers. DesignAir's Top Airport Lounges in the World may not be the most sophisticated study in the world - but it does give us a great insight into... Continue reading

Is it a given in the game of innovation that change is always driven by outsiders? Look at a lesson from the motor industry ... The Daily Telegraph yesterday named the Tesla Model S amongst the most influential car designs ever - alongside the Ford Model S and the Mini. The reasons: the smart underfloor chassis design that allows them to build a plethora of models off a single chassis; the radical dashboard control panel that lets them keep the car totally up-to-date using wifi downloads; the reinvented sales model using town centre shops rather than dealers; the list goes... Continue reading

Inspired by the high-energy, high-output Hackathon movement, we're really excited to be in the process of launching a new concept: Rich-Feedback Workshops. We'vew taken the best elements of our classic workshop approach: lots of fresh stimulus, structured creative challenges and an an inspiring atmosphere - and combined them with the Hackathon's heightened energy and sense of urgency. We've also added the ability to get meaningful overnight on-lilne freedback to insighst and new product ideas - to guide the workshop team in the right creative direction. Brief to quant-validated solutions in as little as three days - and all without sacrificing... Continue reading

The latest John Lewis advert is storytelling at it's best. I don't think a single product from their range appears in the whole 90 seconds, but you have nod doubt at all what the ad is all about. Continue reading