Catapult Innovation is a strategic and creative method designed to help consumer products marketers gain greater insight, clarity and confidence to grow their brand’s impact, influence and income.
In a cluttered marketplace, it’s our assertion that brand leadership is the most compelling differentiation. Only when opportunity and creativity converge into useful value in the marketplace does game-changing product and brand innovation occur.
For those marketers in the early stages of strategic brand planning, we’ve developed a pathway to help them see just over the horizon where their best opportunities are to create new value, rather than compete for what’s already been created.
Barriers to brand innovation we help marketers overcome.
In our collective 50+ years of experience working with business and product marketing teams positioning brands and bringing new products to market, we’ve discovered many marketers commonly face these brand innovation challenges:
Insufficient understanding of who target consumers are and what they really care about.
Many marketers develop and introduce new products that are based more in their existing capabilities to deliver incremental change to customers. Many marketers forget it’s about the customer not their internal capabilities. Innovation is more than understanding customer functional needs and responding, rather it is the ability to bring game changing proposals to the right customers who are mad about what your brand represents to them. People buy into “meanings” more than products. As Henry Ford was fond of saying” had I listened to what people told me they wanted, I would have built a faster horse”. Serving people in ways that truly matter to them is the first step to game-changing brand innovation.
The brand no longer resonates.
Iconic heritage brands can lose their relevance. Preferences shift, consumers move through life, brands loose their shine long before they stop generating cash. Brand meaning gets stretched and weakened by ubiquitous extensions and licensing over time. It can be difficult knowing when and how to best re-invent and re-invest in iconic brands.
Lack of differentiation.
Brand innovation has three fundamental components underlying any value proposition: resonance, difference and substance. Increasingly, product categories are becoming commodities. If a product isn’t good and radically different, it better come with a cheap price, and worse– in a commodity category, any price can be perceived as too expensive. Great brands are built on providing greater use value than people pay in cash value. More product function just adds to the slush pile. You can’t differentiate your brand / product by simply focusing on functions and performance benefits. Brand innovation provides a compelling “proposal of meaning”, that is highly-valued and hard to duplicate.
Moving too fast.
CEO’s are constantly under pressure delivering on their promises to Wall Street. In turn, those promises get turned into financial metrics that product development and marketing organizations have to meet. Consequently, the focus is on the urgent and not the important. Seldom is a long view valued, product and brand development steps get shortened, and the quality and depth of strategic and creative thinking can be marginalized. The old saying rings true “there’s never enough time to do it right, and always time to do it twice”.
Competing priorities and resources.
The cost of creating a new brand is daunting. In some CPG categories, new brands lasting more than a year after launch has dropped to 10%. Share of mind has never been more difficult for marketers. Retail channels are changing almost daily. Resources to fund the marketing for brand building initiatives is getting harder to come by. Do more with less is the new normal. As the slices of the budget pie get smaller, and the pace to market quickens, it’s pretty obvious how results often can be disappointing. Add to that the inefficiencies caused by siloed disciplines, and it becomes easy to see why management can have no real sense of confidence their making sound business decisions on which opportunities they are well-suited to pursue.
Catapult Innovation brings clarity and confidence to the strategic and creative decisions you will make to build a solid foundation for your business success.
Outcomes– the Catapult Brand Innovation process is designed to help you create desired business outcomes. Catapult is not a formula. It provides a disciplined structure for strategic and creative thinking when you’re in the early stages of inventing new brands, introducing new products, or breathing new life into under-performing brands. We tailor our method to serve your specific circumstances, and bring together (at various points along the way) a diverse group of thought leaders who broaden the perspective, expertise and creativity necessary to help client teams gain clarity and confidence to pursue their best opportunities. More importantly, Catapult is a grounded process that includes the rigor of qualitative and quantitative research. Testing verbal and visual prototypes against what really matters to consumers is a critical component. The result is brand innovation strategies and ideas that prove themselves worthy of the future investment required downstream for full development and market launch.
You can learn more about our Catapult Brand Innovation method by downloading our Catapult Innovation Overview (pdf). Better yet, allow us to share with you in a confidential conversation how Catapult Innovation has created a positive impact on the brand building initiatives of established and emerging brands. To start the conversation, feel free toemail Thomson Dawson, Managing Partner.
