North America
Our Approach to Innovation
We understand the key drivers of winning innovation and provide the expertise and perspective needed to deliver it. By understanding each of the key drivers, and incorporating unique, future focused tools into our approach, GfK Strategic Innovation helps clients find — and translate — future opportunities into sustainable growth.
Consumer Insights
The process begins with Consumer Discovery® 720, a comprehensive, deep dive into the world of the consumer. We utilize progressive techniques, including market structure groups, Consumer Experience Mapping, ethnographies, affinity groups, web mining and leveraging our strong relationships with "future” experts across a wide variety of disciplines to assure a forward-looking solution. Our approach taps into unarticulated needs far better than traditional approaches alone, and gets to deeper insights that help drive big creative ideas later in the process.
Business Dynamics
GfK Strategic Innovation provides deep rigor on the "fuzzy front end” of the innovation process. We delve into the brands and the organization to better understand the internal view, including equities and core competencies. We also look externally, conducting a deep assessment of competition and the market landscape. This work is necessary to uncover potential new "news” about the world and importantly, to identify what leverage a client organization might bring against future opportunities.
Innovation Patterns
GfK Strategic Innovation brings an unique understanding and perspective on innovation, along with proprietary resources that have been honed through years of research and real-world application. The result is the Innovation Tree®, a predictive model that helps analyze and reveal evolutionary innovation patterns and emerging trends in core and ancillary categories. This potent tool allows us to identify high-potential, future innovation opportunities. We can better identify evolving consumer needs, and create a Future Opportunity Map™ that highlights paths an organization might take to be truly forward thinking and differentiating in its brand innovation.
Creativity
Integral to the process is GfK Strategic Innovation’s ability to see the world through different lenses. Whether it is how we look at the marketplace, how we approach predictive modeling, or how we translate identified opportunities into product concepts, we "connect the dots” to bring true insight to clients. We never forget to link our creative thinking to strategic opportunities…this synthesis is the thread that runs through and helps define our work. In particular, we bring an innovation design process of ideation, concept development and refinement that results in a full pipeline of benchmark-beating product concepts. Concepts that are actionable, ownable, built from company leverage points, and integrated into a complete roadmap of how to build the business over time.
For more information, contact us.
The GfK Strategic Innovation Difference
"Your work is the best! From business analysis to creative visioning your work is grounded, practical and actionable. Looking forward to working with you again in the future"
VP, Marketing/R&D
Household Products