Stepping Out From The Ivory Towers
We’ve successfully managed industry/category leading brands…so we know that sometimes brand teams can find themselves trapped up in their ‘ivory towers’, caught between internal sell-in/debate, retail pressures, broadcast pressures, development issues and marketing development and execution.
The challenge with allowing that to happen is that it’s easy to lose touch with the reality…that being consumers choosing to take your product off the shelves, or to select your entertainment content over the vast array of alternatives on offer.
The reality is that most companies in our industry take huge financial risks with comparatively little validation. For sure most companies at least debate and argue over what should be created and developed & how, but comparatively few meaningfully test with the end consumer, who in the final analysis is the true arbiter of your success or failure.
Consumer insight is PROVEN to deliver meaningful insight into the prospects of your development. Often times, it’s about small tweaks which can make a massive difference in terms of the proposition for the end consumer, sometimes it’s more fundamental challenges, and sometimes the feedback is clearly don’t proceed with this. An example of the latter from our own experience would have seen a particular toy company save $5m that was eventually wasted, as the product was deeply flawed, yet despite our advice to that point, the toy company proceeded with the launch which bombed.
More frequently though we find we can help to validate existing presumptions, build organisational belief in products, and recommend essential (but often simple) tweaks to maximise potential for success.
The over riding point here is that if you don’t step down from the ivory towers and ask kids what they think of your content / products, you are taking a great leap into the unknown…
