Ichi-go-ichi-e (one time, one encounter), a Japanese phrase, often used in the context of martial arts or tea ceremonies, describes the non-repeatable nature of a moment, and the need for full commitment. Launching an innovation is an event like that; you have to get it right the first time – you don’t get a second chance.  This is especially important given that most product launches fail. In light of this, it is surprising that companies launch innovations without sufficient insight. While in a volatile and uncertain world, predicting success is difficult, one can be reasonably confident that without insight a launch will eventually fail.

 

In this blog, based on our experience, I am advocating the deployment of a hybrid approach to increase the likelihood of success for a launch by combining many different techniques to maximise insight without the need for a massive research budget.

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Many decisions need many techniques

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Many decisions need to be taken for a launch – choosing the target segment, determining the positioning, optimising product features, selecting the price, designing the channel mix and creating a communication plan. These decisions can be broken further into sub-decisions, each of which require a specific research approach to provide useful insights. For instance, understanding the environment for product use requires ethnographic work; determining the performance, usability and the aesthetics requires testing prototypes; assessing of the value of the product and its features needs robust quantitative tools such as conjoint analysis. You cannot substitute one technique for another. This logic can be extended to other decisions related to segmentation, branding and communication, pricing, and channel strategy. To get the greatest value from research, a programme must deploy multiple techniques, and use these to elicit insight for the same set of consumers.

 

This is rarely done because of the following reasons:

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1. A legitimate concern about burdening the respondent with a long questionnaire
 

2. One-sidedness in many forms:

• People may lack knowledge or capabilities in multiple disciplines or operate in a siloed manner, e.g., have a qualitative research or design team that has limited interest or capability in quantitative analysis or a quant heavy team with the reverse effects.

• There might be a greater emphasis on one aspect, e.g., branding and communication rather than other business levers, such as pricing.

• Often leaders might focus on big strategic questions at the expense of executional details or vice-versa.

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3. An incorrect assumption that the cost of such research would be very high

 

A minority of companies deal with this by undertaking multiple projects, each focused on one specific objective, e.g., pricing research or product testing. However, conducting many projects requires a large research budget. Furthermore, doing multiple research projects without a common set of respondents is less powerful as you cannot formulate a complete picture of the customers.

 

Our solution is to design a hybrid research programme which combines many different techniques with the same set of people in a way that provides the maximum insight whilst not being onerous to the respondent. Given below is a case study based on an innovative consumer durable. With the necessary adaptations, the lessons apply to other categories as well.

 

Case example: Launching a new consumer technology using a hybrid approach to insight

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Our client wanted to launch three innovative and environmentally friendly temperature control products in the U.S. The category was nascent, and our client’s ambition was to significantly grow it. We conducted two rounds of ethnographic work with 35 residential and B2B consumers, the testing of physical prototypes, and a 1200 sample quantitative study. The qualitative work was conducted in LA, Denver, Phoenix, Austen, Dallas, Chicago, Florida, Miami, and New York, and the quantitative work was based on a nationwide sample.

 

Each of these rounds of research deployed many techniques. Given below are the main business decisions taken and the supporting insights techniques:

 

It is worth highlighting that what made this programme special is that a single research programme helped create a cohesive strategy addressing most of the business decisions for the launch

 

1. Clarified and quantified the opportunity and identified early adopter segments who were likely to be disproportionately large contributors to value: An inhabitant of a 10,000 square feet house in Phoenix has very different needs to someone in a one-bedroom apartment in downtown Chicago or a family that loves entertaining to an introverted household. The ethnography provided a nuanced understanding of the environments, unmet needs, and the variables that shaped the needs. Using these and other variables, we conducted multivariate analysis to develop, quantify, and prioritise segments in the quantitative research.

 

2. Provided the engineering team with granular feedback on necessary improvements to the products’ design, usability, and functionality: Whilst the ethnography helped clearly map out the different indoor and outdoor use cases, testing physical prototypes identified many minor blind spots that would have derailed the launch, e.g., no one would pay a premium for the type of plastic used, or how a prototype that worked perfectly indoors, failed in certain outdoor conditions, or that storage for an accessory was going to be a dealbreaker. The discrete choice exercise in the quantitative survey helped us assess the value of different features, especially the optional ones.  Since discrete choice analysis can only handle a limited number of features, max-diff was used to get a quantitative prioritisation of other features.

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3. Determined the optimal price: This was based on value perceptions and elasticity of demand at different prices using the discrete choice and other pricing techniques.

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4. Determined the engagement strategy: For this we analysed actual purchase data from online retailers to get an understanding of the landscape, simulated online shopping behaviour, and created quantitative shopper behaviour archetypes.

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5. Crafted the brand architecture for the portfolio and positioning for each of the individual innovations: We designed the brand strategy by looking at analogous cases, conducting workshops, and exploring various options in the primary research.

 

Four conditions to implement such a model

 

1. Collaborate continuously with a cross-functional team: A launch requires the collaboration of many functional groups. This helps sharpen the business questions, adapt to shifting priorities, develop new creative ideas, and ensure fast execution. In this instance, the core team, comprising the Insight Dojo team and members of the client’s commercial, product management, and marketing teams, met every week for the entire duration of 6 months. The CEO attended the meeting every month, and other members such as designers, engineers, and salespeople were consulted on an ad-hoc basis.

2. Get an insights team with fluency in multiple areas: Having team members who have good problem-solving skills and fluency in applying different qualitative and quantitative techniques is essential. First, you need good problem solvers to understand the business issues and translate those into the right research questions and techniques. Second, designing a programme with a variety of techniques that is not burdensome for the respondent requires a lot of knowledge and skill. For people with a certain level of mastery, techniques are an extension of thinking and seeing, and they can tailor these artfully to a specific context.  Third, learnings from each stage of the research must be seamlessly used to refine the subsequent stages. Whilst you might be able to achieve this with different specialists, there is a lot of efficiency in having polymathic people piece the programme together. We had multiple team members who could do it all, e.g., moderate the problem-solving workshops with the client, conduct the ethnography, test prototypes, and run a variety of quantitative analyses, before synthesising the recommendations.

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3. Design research instruments for easy experience using certain guidelines:

• Organise for simplicity: While crafting the research instruments (e.g., a questionnaire), one must avoid redundancies and be ruthless in retaining only essential elements of the technique.

• Problem solve with the client and use qualitative research to reduce the number of variables:  The main driver of complexity and length of an interview is the number of variables. For instance, for conjoint based techniques, it is the number of attributes and levels, while for clustering, it is the number of attitudinal, behavioural or demographic variables. Reducing these variables through iterative problem solving and analysing qualitative research is highly valuable.

• Break the research stage into different modules to make it easier for the respondent: To simplify the qualitative research, we focused the first round of ethnography on pure exploration of the needs, then we tested prototypes, and conducted a further round of ethnography to test concepts

• Pre-test the instruments: To elicit high quality responses, respondents  should have an “approach” rather than an “avoid” mentality towards the study. Testing and refining the instruments are an essential part of the process.

4. Focus communication on the insights, actions, and business outcomes; not on the techniques: We ran many workshops with the client, including a session with the entire global leadership team. Our emphasis was on the size of the prize, the strategy and tactics, and the supporting insights. We talked very little about the rich repertoire of techniques underpinning the work because we did not want to distract our clients from the outcomes. We believe it is a good approach to not overwhelm the client with the intricacies of the techniques. One might feel a sense of loss to not communicate the elegance of the design, but ultimately, the distinctiveness and specificity of insights convey that more powerfully.

 

Deploying a hybrid-approach packed with many techniques will lead to a truly insight-backed successful launch. For your budget, you will get a much higher return.