Unearthing Innovation Opportunities

Challenge

Helping a massive international retailer unearth actionable benefit and feature innovation opportunities that can drive incremental membership growth.

The way people shop is ever evolving, and “loyalty” to brands is taking on a whole new meaning. Subscriptions, paid memberships and loyalty programs are causing people to think deeply about what it means to interact with a brand. Whether it’s about paying a monthly fee, or just signing up free of charge, people are making the conscious choice to integrate brands into their everyday lives rather than just interacting with them on occasion.

Approach

First, we conducted a remine of research to date around shopping and app usage. Gaps were then filled via a contextual audit that focused on: the cultural realities the brand will need to contend with, what’s going on in the category now, and future trends. To ensure the innovation pipeline would resonate with people, we then engaged key shopping targets to understand the delights and pain points of utilizing loyalty programs, subscriptions & memberships. Lastly, we facilitated an in-person innovation sprint with the cross-functional client team, immersing them in the research before guiding them through an ideation process. We narrowed down ideas together, which we then optimized  to understand which ones were human-centric and solving the challenges people face. The winning ideas were then shared with the brand team to create feasible concepts to fuel their pipeline.

Impact

As well as giving much needed richness and depth to the team’s understanding of their target audiences and how best to communicate with them, the innovation workshop generated a range of new service and program ideas, to retain existing members and bring new ones to the brand.