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Good new product ideas are hard to come by. Even the best product and design groups lose a lot of time to getting existing products built, delivered and sold. New products that are one-offs or line extensions are important and should be included in your product development plans, but they only hold the line on sales; they aren’t usually a source for real sales growth. Likewise, factory-created products that everyone reviews and most reject also don’t tend to be a source of blockbuster new product sales. You need successful new products – probably a quarter to a third of your offerings every year – to stay in business never mind to grow your business. So where to get those new ideas? Two excellent sources are consumers and category experts.
Ethnographic Needs Studies
The best way to identify new products is to identify unfilled needs. That’s not easy, but deep dives into consumers’ lives by trained researchers using a variety of tools and techniques often uncovers needs that are not addressed by products on the market today. We often go to consumers’ homes and observe how they do things, how they cook and clean, where they store things, how they use things, etc. We don’t ask them what their unmet needs are, but we do ask questions, like “what is the one thing you would you change about your….” Or “what frustrations do you have using x“ or “if you could buy a premium version of your X, what would its features be?” “Or what will X products do in the future?” It’s not only the answers to these questions that sheds insights, but observing behaviors and probing “why did you do it that way?” By careful observation and a lot of questioning we have never failed to uncover more new ideas than our clients were seeking.
Expert Panels
Another approach to needs studies is expert panels. This relates to the point above regarding how your product and design groups don’t have the time to do serious new product work. We take your team (often plus others – perhaps from your ad agency, public relations agency or outside designers) to an offsite for a day. We prepare presentations meant to stimulate thinking and then we guide waves of breakout idea-generation sessions. The output is a list of dozens to even hundreds of ideas, often prioritized by your team at the end of the day.