Idea Generation and Innovation

Idea generation can be daunting. But innovation helps your brand remain relevant with your loyal consumers. It builds even more brand affinity. It drives appeal with new consumers and adapts your brand to new needs as people’s lifestyle changes.

So where do you start?

How do you make sure you have considered and truly understood your consumer and all of their needs?

How do you find an insight to respond to and how do you interpret this into a winning idea?

When you are swamped in the day to day management of a brand switching on your right brain can be really difficult. Which is why we can guide and support you through the entire process as much or as little as you need.

As your innovation guide, Reach offers a number of tangible, measurable benefits:

• Gathering of rich cultural stimulus, presented in a stimulating and relevant way
• Provide a tailored toolkit of idea generation techniques, suited to your brief, the workshop style and participants for optimal brainstorming
• Facilitate an inspiring, energetic and thought-provoking workshop to stimulate a wealth of rich ideas that meet an unmet consumer need
• Interpret your idea into a research-ready concept to provide the best possible outcome in concept testing.
• Craft a concept that can be developed into a detailed product and packaging brief, with a hierarchy of messages and benefits.

Who is this service for?

You own a brand that currently exists within the food, drink or healthcare industry or a brand seeking to get into these categories. You may be looking for idea generation to stretch into new geographical regions but want to develop the best range. You recognise the value innovation contributes to your brand, the category, to the consumer and to your commercial bottom line. You are seeking ways to elevate your brand to improve its relevance with your consumers.

You may have some initial ideas and thoughts but aren’t quite sure how to develop and finesse the ideas to be consumer winning ideas. Or you may want to take a broader view, take a blank piece of paper and make sure no stone is unturned to uncover that nugget of an idea.

Benefits of working with Reach

As with any well written concept, we bring a bundle of tangible benefits; we take time to explore cultural insights, what’s going on in your category across the world, what makes your consumer tick (or not). We bring a vast array of tried and tested idea generation techniques, so we can identify the best tools needed to uncover those consumer insights and build them into a gem of an idea.

But any market changing concept not only needs to boast outstanding tangible benefits. It’s the added layer of emotional benefits which nudge the idea over the line. And we bring oodles through our passion, energy and inquisitive minds. These add the extra bonus to push your ideation sessions harder for a bountiful range of ideas at the end of the session which we will craft into concepts that consumers instantly connect with.

How the process works

1. Conversation. We’ll start with a conversation to understand your needs and check that we can help you with the particular challenge you are facing for roughly the budget you have. Our packages start with an Idea Generation workshop and rise through to Silver package that delivers approx 20  written concepts for screener testing and on to Gold which also includes packcept design for concepts.
2. Face to Face. This will be followed by a face-to-face meeting where you will give us an overview briefing and we can give you an idea of what we’re like to work with by showing you case studies that demonstrate how we have successfully tackled similar challenges before. We’ll also agree the full scope of the project.
3. Outline costs. All being well, and if the chemistry is right, we will follow up this meeting with a proposal that outlines the process, costs and timing. And once that is signed off, we can then kick the project off.
4. Pre-workshop Prep. There will be some pre-work for your team to help you download all your knowledge. We also cast our net far and wide to bring rich stimulus to the workshop, including gathering user insight edited into a video.
5. Workshop. The next step will be a workshop with your team and the Reach team facilitated by Caroline Hagen (Reach Founder and Lead Strategist) and  Sharon Brunt (Brand and Innovation Consultant) and senior Reach designers.  Here we will stimulate our minds to go deep, far and wide to generate consumer-loving new product ideas. 
6. Written concepts. Once the ideas are shortlisted using our recommended judgement criteria, we can then go on to develop the raw ideas from the workshop into consumer-friendly written concepts.
7. Packcepts. We can also create quick ‘packcept’ designs that bring the new products to life for consumers alongside the written concept. These are 2d designs on the pack format with a quick translation of the brand identity into pack graphics, incorporating any required category language.
   
8. You are now ready for screening research.