Case Study: Identifying New Opportunities

New Applications for Existing Technology

Have you ever felt like you weren’t getting the full potential out of a product or technology? A large Building Products manufacturer came to us with a similar feeling. They had developed an innovative new technology and felt like it had many more applications (but didn’t know which applications). Today we’ll take you on the journey of how a Building Products manufacturer identified new opportunities, improved their product positioning, and learned how to best communicate to their two main audiences (Homebuilders and Remodelers).

Research Objectives

• Leverage the thoughts and experiences of those in the building trade (specifically Homebuilders & Remodelers)
• Solicit a wide range of ideas relevant to potential new product development
• Ideas solicited in the context of three primary topic areas designed to:
  • Identify home building/remodeling problem areas
  • Explore positive aspects of the building trade experience, particularly innovative products and products that offer superior value or contribute to higher homeowner satisfaction
  • Brainstorm new applications of the clients new technology in home building and remodeling

Research Methodology

The research was conducted using brandDelphi™, a proprietary online brainstorming tool, with the objective of generating a volume of insights and ideas.

• Solicits key stakeholder thoughts and ideas, in their own words and uses these as a basis for strategy development
• Language is “Tell me about…” rather than questions
• Designed to solicit a wide range of inputs and identify the strongest ideas based on importance and relevance

brandDelphi™ is a “quali/quant” tool that allows us to provide Voice-of-the-Customer idea generation along with a quantitative statistical backing.

Analytical Approach

Using powerful linguistic software we are able to identify key themes from the responses. Then we measure the significance of the themes by sorting them by their “importance” and “relevance” scores (see table below).

We try to focus on Star and Niche ideas.

Results

By using the brandDelphi approach, our client was able to:

• Identify the strongest new applications for their new technology
• Understand the perceived adoption barriers for their new technology.
• Understand the expectations from the building trade and how expectations differed in both parties (Homebuilders & Remodelers)
• Understand how to communicate to the building trade by isolating the variables of greatest impact

Key Takeaways

Over the years, our experience with many companies has revealed that the Consumer (who we think is the real “expert”for deciding what the market is willing to purchase) is being left out of the process for developing product and concept ideas

• Particularly at the “fuzzy front-end”of the development process –where input from the “experts”can be most valuable

By including consumers early on in the process, the Building Products manufacturer was able to generate several new applications for their product (directly from the people who matter most).