Freshen Up New Concept Thinking with Client Immersion

Developing concepts for your brand or business can be so challenging particularly because a client “lives” the brand every single day at work. The professionals working on a particular business can’t help but “drink the Kool-Aid®”; they are, after all, employed by the company that is marketing the product(s) or service(s), and some adherence to a company bias is almost unavoidable. They are heavily invested in the product or service, and it becomes extremely difficult to maintain clear neutrality.

To help alleviate this bias, consider having an outsider help immerse your client team for better ideation. Although a variety of approaches can be used, here are 3 sure-fire ways that a outsider can help you develop a fresher, more creative perspective on your business or brand.

1. Casual Client Led Interviews – I often ask a client to conduct some informal interviews with friends, family, or colleagues who don’t work on their business. It doesn’t matter whether the client follows all the appropriate guidelines for asking unbiased or leading questions, my goal is to ensure they are hearing from a neutral source something potentially new about their product/service to prime the pump prior to the session.

I always provide several specific questions that should engage the client and highlight some aspect of their business with plenty of blank lines for the answers. A great example of using this approach was with a manufacturer of watches. As pre-work for an ideation session, I told the client participants to ask several questions in an interview; however, one of the most engaging learnings prior to the session was a very simple and almost obvious question of “What is time?”

2. Product/Service Experience. – The nature of the client’s business will determine whether “real-time” experience with the product/service must happen before or during the session. Interestingly, what often happens with clients is that they might not even use the product or service they sell. As such, they need to reacquaint themselves with the product or service with what I call “a new set of radar.”

Often as part of an ideation session, I’ll ask the client to use their product. For example, I’ll have the client’s R&D team make a toilet or shower filthy and have the clients clean it; many clients hire a cleaning person for these tasks – they haven’t cleaned a toilet in 10 years! To really engage their thinking I’ll typically divide the team up and add some constraints to the process such as blind-folded or using a non-dominant hand. Why the constraints? It helps the client think about the experience in a fresh way. You’d be surprised at the output from an experience such as the one described.

The same experience can be duplicated for a service business. Have the client call his/her own or a competitor’s customer service line and evaluate the experience. Ask a client to mystery shop several competitors’ stores for a particular product or service, or be a mystery diner for a restaurant. They could even Google key industry words and see what comes up and determine whether the information was confusing or straightforward. The possibilities are endless. However, they do require some creative pre-thinking by the session leader to ensure the experience is carefully incorporated into the overall ideation session.

3. Watch in-Context Product Usage Videos – Often clients have lost touch with what their consumers are really doing with their product or service Occasionally, a refresher on what is happening is appropriate. This is particularly helpful when a product may be used in a variety of applications or across different countries. If the marketing engine for a product is based in one particular region, like the US or Europe, it may be staggering to realize that assumptions that are true for one region may not be true for all.

One particular example comes to mind. I was working on concept development for a North American based household cleanser brand in Brazil. As part of the session, I asked that the non-Brazilians watch some in-home cleaning with their products. Imagine the surprise when they watched tapes of barefooted women cleaning their bathroom with a giant broom-like mop and a hose! Clearly, this experience changed many in-coming assumptions and paradigms about the new product concepts.

So the next time you are facing that daunting task of developing new concept ideas, more effectively leverage the knowledge and intellect of you team through immersion. At the end of the day, if you are armed with better information, know more about your consumer’s experience, and have added a healthy dose of reality to the marketing approach – everyone is in a better place. You’ve succeed in creating an environment that is ripe for innovation.

Copyright 2007 The Rite Concept – May not be reproduced without expressed permission