Recently, a client approached us with a great challenge.
The challenge:
In order to achieve its ambitious revenue objectives, this client had to grow three times faster than the category average and realized that it needed to re-imagine its product development processes in a way that attracted new consumers and further engaged current ones.
Their brief to us was clear: Help them look at their business differently, unleash new growth potential and identify new growth opportunities.
The solution:
To solve their problem, we turned to Positioning-Roulette. One of the Positioning-Roulette principles focuses on “re-defining the business”. This principle states that “re-framing your brand’s category around the broader consumer needs, motivations and conventions often produces a new set of opportunities and more inspiring competitors against which to position your brand(s)”.
So, through a series of qualitative workshops (with consumers and employees) and additional quantitative research we were able to identify, organize and quantify a new “space” (or frame of category reference) around the relevant consumer needs consumers were trying to satisfy in that category.
The results (for obvious reasons the actual results are kept confidential):
Re-defining the business around consumer needs and emotions enabled us to identify and highlight a major weakness in the current product portfolio. Because of this client’s strong focus on products and attributes (which in itself is not a bad thing as it had lead them to build a billion dollar business) the whole product portfolio was only satisfying a small number of the relevant emotions and need states within the category (the top left side of the map).
We were also able to show them that their actual market and growth potential was twice as big as their current market size by identifying and quantifying at least half a dozen relevant white space opportunities begging for new products to satisfy relevant untapped consumer needs (in this case, the untapped needs situated on the right side of the map).
And in addition to identifying these growth opportunities, taking a fresh look at the category also enabled us provide a recommendation on how to re-position some of the current products within the portfolio to better align them with relevant consumer needs and emotions.
In the words of the VP Marketing leading this initiative, “First The Trousers brought research and product planning methodologies that changed the paradigm. By looking at our products from the consumer perspective, we were able to harness the power of human emotions and need states to make our business more relevant and more profitable. With FTT’s assistance we will be making dynamic changes to the current portfolio while launching new innovations in FY16.”
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