Challenged with meeting customer needs in an ever-changing market, brand teams need agile research options that deliver robust solutions.
Developing innovative offerings requires a commitment to agile research.
Over the past few years, brands have faced a turbulent ride, rapidly adapting their products, services, and strategies to meet shifting customer needs during the pandemic. This swift adjustment set a new standard, with consumers now expecting companies to innovate faster, demanding speed, flexibility, and agility from brand teams.
As spending normalizes, brands are receiving mixed signals. According to a recent McKinsey Consumer Wise report, there are many complexities in assessing current consumer trends, particularly as optimism about the economy grows while spending behaviors remain cautious. Despite a rebound in confidence, U.S. consumers continue to “trade down,” favoring lower-cost options, delaying purchases, or seeking higher value from their spending. This behavior suggests a sustained focus on financial prudence, even among high-income groups and demographics traditionally more inclined to splurge.1
These mixed signals—rising optimism but restrained spending—reflect a nuanced consumer landscape shaped by both lingering economic uncertainties and a shift toward more mindful consumption.
These mixed signals—rising optimism but restrained spending—reflect a nuanced consumer landscape shaped by both lingering economic uncertainties and a shift toward more mindful consumption.”
The need for innovation speed—and depth.
To sustain growth while meeting market demands, brands need to maintain a strong commitment to generating innovative offerings and experiences as certain customer needs and behaviors will change again. The speed of these customer changes will not slow down, which means brand teams will rely even more heavily on quick and agile research approaches to stay ahead of the innovation and new product pipeline. Technologies such as AI-based research will play a role in innovation development, but it cannot be the only driver in the agile research necessary to speed new and relevant ideas to market.
Agile research is typically thought of as deploying software technology to quickly gather customer data or accelerating the process and project management in some way. As in all industries, market research has benefited from technology tools to increase speed of data collection and project delivery.
But the investment in new product or service development, including capital expenditures, is too great and the ROI too critical to brand success to rely only on agile research. Early-stage development, or the fuzzy front end, requires sessions between internal teams and co-creation with consumers. This kind of input keeps teams from operating in a vacuum. This approach ensures ideas are allowed to flourish to identify the most compelling offerings.
The approach that has worked best for brand teams over these tumultuous last few years is agile research that blends the right mix of technology and talent—the people with the expertise in generating early-stage ideas, leading co-creation with customers, and aligning internal stakeholders on making the right choices for brand growth. A rapid process for concept ideation, iteration, and validation should be led by innovation experts that can guide your team in identifying high-potential opportunities, as this ensures more successful outcomes from your investments.
The approach that has worked best for brand teams over these tumultuous last few years is agile research that blends the right mix of technology and talent—the people with the expertise in generating early-stage ideas, leading co-creation with customers, and aligning internal stakeholders on making the right choices for brand growth.”
Five innovation strategies to help you meet changing customer and client needs.
Innovation success requires an agile approach that builds on strong data and customer or client insights. These five strategies help brand teams develop strong action plans:
1. An approach customized for your brand.
No one size fits all when it comes to Innovation Research. You’re not choosing a software, or a DIY tool, but brand and marketing professionals who take the time to deeply understand the complexity of your brand. This includes the pain points that you are solving for, who your target audience is, as well as the guardrails of what a company can or cannot do. They also customize the approach to take into account your current practices such as an existing concept testing system. Your insights partner should be willing to evaluate what you are using to see which ones are most predictive of success, and incorporate those into the approach.
2. Ability to deliver deep insights, not just speed.
Traditional innovation development uncovers robust insights. But this approach typically takes months, which isn’t ideal for a fast-changing environment. Super-rapid agile research tools don’t dig deep enough into customer behaviors and needs. A successful innovation solution uses digital tools to accelerate the ideation and collaboration, and is immersive enough to deliver the deep, strategic insights necessary for game-changing, business-building new ideas.
3. Real-time, ongoing co-creation with customers.
An online survey measures the attitudes and preferences of your customers at that moment in time, and can be limiting in allowing a customer to play with a new idea or build on it. An agile research approach for innovation development is built around real-time, ongoing sessions with consumers. For example, webcam triads over a period of days to test potential concepts. Or a 3-day mobile-first community among target consumers to allow posting of thoughts throughout their day. In-home ethnographies also generate contextual understanding key to identifying the nuances that can lead to breakthrough ideas.
4. Technology and talent for productive virtual and live team collaboration. For innovation to be successful, you have to get many hands and feet inside a company to be moving in the same direction. As we see more teams returning to the office, we are able to host more live sessions with stakeholders, bringing a better balance to remote and live sessions. The right insights partner plans relentlessly to ensure each session goes as is needed to be successful. You don’t want to run the risk of having team members disengaged, or the sessions result in less than stellar new ideas.
5. Seamless flow between consumer and team ideation.
A strong agile insights partner understands how to keep things moving fluidly between team alignment and consumer learnings, and from concept ideation through validation. The innovation development process should capture team decisions, customer insights, and the activation plan in a formal document to socialize the innovation plan throughout the organization.
Agile + Robust can co-exist.
The traditional innovation development approaches often take months to produce concepts and ideas that a brand team can move forward within the organization. This new agile approach adopts the best of today’s technology tools with expert insights, facilitation and guidance. It allows deep immersive consumer learning and team ideation to be integrated into fast, agile (even overnight) online quantitative studies and screeners. From the first team alignment through optimization and assessment can take as little as several weeks.
Now more than ever, a brand’s growth journey depends on delivering relevant products and experiences using an agile and robust development process combining the right talent and technology tools to ensure depth is not traded away for speed alone.
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1. “An update on US consumer sentiment: A boost in optimism amid the holiday spending season.” McKinsey, 2024. Authored by Christina Adams.