Brand Innovation: An Essential Strategy For Success
by Adam Siegel, Seed Strategy
The Importance of Brand Innovation
Many people think innovation is all about brainstorming new ideas and introducing new products and services. But it’s much more than that. Brand innovation can also take the form of a brand refresh, new packaging design, promotional merchandising, menu/portfolio optimization or even manufacturing, sourcing and supply chain improvements.
No matter the specific output, brand innovation is critical in today’s dynamic, omnichannel environment. It helps motivate internal brand teams and inspire consumers. Continuous innovation that’s guided by solid brand strategy helps enhance a brand’s identity, reinforce brand purpose, grow market share and protect against brand erosion and commoditization.
In reality, today’s businesses must continuously innovate—unless they want to risk being lapped by the competition.
How Burke Can Help
Together with Seed Strategy, Burke helps brands develop unique solutions that marry best-in-class strategic analytics and decision science with breakthrough innovation and creative strategy to meet unmet customer needs.
Our services, our people and our processes have all been designed to help our clients maximize their topline growth.
Together, we leverage nearly a century of research discipline to redefine brand innovation. We dream, explore, build, quantify and validate creative ideas like no other to unlock a fresh, holistic perspective on our clients’ biggest opportunities.
What We Do
Our capabilities span all stages of the brand innovation process—so whether you need to ideate around whitespace opportunities to bring big, innovative ideas to life; optimize ideas quickly for a timely, confident launch; test the pulse of your brand, product, or service, with dynamic in-market assessment; or all the above, we can help.
WE IDENTIFY:
We define up-front marketing strategy, including…
- Business Vision & Brand Strategy
- Segmentation Strategy & Illumination
- Business Model Innovation
We set direction for brands with…
- Brand Positioning & Renovation
- Portfolio & Category Planning
We uncover foundational knowledge through…
- Segmentation Definition
- Consumer Journey Mapping
- Social Media Listening & Qualitative Ethnography
WE CREATE:
We help brands create new products and services through…
- Custom Ideation Events, Innovation Sprints & Consumer Co-Creation
- Brand Concept Creation With Photorealistic Creative & Visual Identity
- Naming Development
We conquer new categories with…
- Consumer & Customer Target Expansion
- Category & Domain Expansion
We mine for insights via…
- Immersive Qualitative
- Online Consumer Panels & Video Diaries
WE OPTIMIZE:
We perfect new concepts with…
- Quantitative & Qualitative Concept Vetting & Optimization
- In-Market Transactional Learning
- Product/Portfolio Optimization
WE HELP LAUNCH:
We tell compelling business stories with…
- Strategic Narration
- Data Illumination & Scoreboards
- Customer Selling & Retailer Engagement
We help brands launch to market through…
- Commercial Idea Development
- Customer Experience Development
We track brand success via…
- Brand & Communication Tracking
- Early Trier & Brand Acceptor/Rejector Follow-Ups
- Occasion Tracking/Diaries
A Closer Look at Our Work
We’ve helped brands, both big and small, across a wide variety of industries and geographies. Here’s a real-world example of our brand innovation work. Feel free to reach out if you’d like to see more. (The identity of the specific brand has been withheld due to the confidential nature of our work.)
Freshening a Juice Brand’s Product Mix for Category Expansion and Parent Brand Longevity.
BUSINESS OBJECTIVE: Help a major fruit juice brand offset declines in category consumption via new expansion opportunities and multi-year pipelines spanning several sub-categories.
HUMAN-CENTRIC MISSION: Create new products that break category tensions and successfully meet consumers’ evolving tastes and preferences.
OUR APPROACH:First, we determined current perceptions of the brand and its existing products to identify where it has a right to win and what brand equities must be maintained in new products.
Next, we developed robust strategic product innovation platforms and leveraged them to create a wide spectrum of cross-category ideas.
Then, we utilized our proprietary Hive methodology to leverage consumer input to help vet and optimize lead ideas, resulting in the strongest possible concepts for quantitative testing.
THE OUTCOME: We developed 12 fully-optimized concepts plus 30 additional ideas to fill the brand’s 3–5-year pipeline, ultimately helping the client successfully expand into one of the fastest-growing segments in the beverage category while initiating a plan to move towards becoming a parent brand.
Interested in learning more about how we can help you with your brand innovation efforts? Contact us!
Adam Siegel is the Editor of The Accelerator and VP, Creative at Seed Strategy where he draws upon his diverse experience in advertising, research and innovation to craft breakthrough creative and winning concept copy.
Follow Seed Strategy on our LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram pages.
Interested in reading more? Check out Adam’s other article:
Consumers’ Needs Are Evolving, and so Should You
As always, you can follow Burke, Inc. on our LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram pages.
Source: Feature Image – ©Looker_Studio – stock.adobe.com
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