Classified - Confidential

Mind Mapping of CPG Categories

Challenge & Selection

I work in Marketing Insights at a large CPG manufacturer.  In the course of my work, we began asking  big, meaty, foundational questions around why consumers were really using our products and how we  might better serve them today, as well as innovate for the future.  In asking these types of questions, we  began with the exact same framework as the Design Thinking questions!  Knowing that we would need  help from consumers to answer our questions, we decided that we needed to create something like a  mind map to better understand jobs to be done for our products and why consumers were using our  product to satisfy those jobs.  Then, we wanted to understand where those most relevant jobs weren’t  satisfied currently and as our next step, design criteria and possible solutions to fulfill those consumer  jobs.

Application

We started the process by identifying existing knowledge around the jobs that consumers are trying to  get done with our products. We have multiple-market awareness and usage surveys that includes many  attributes that we could leverage.  In pulling together those attributes, we created a strawman mind  map to arrange the attributes into functional, emotional and social jobs.  We wanted to look at this  strawman to see how well this captured the complete uses of our products.    In very short order, our collective intuition was pinging.  There were a great deal of functional jobs and  even some emotional, but the social and even identity outcomes were missing.  We had more work to  do.    We conducted primary qualitative research to find the additional jobs across multiple markets globally.   We had 90-minute in-depth dyadic interviews with consumers who were simply prompted to bring in 5- 7 images that represent how they think or feel about our product category.  We then analyzed that data  leveraging a proprietary algorithm to extract meaning, identify patterns and allow for insights to emerge  around the existing jobs and any newly discovered jobs.    Insight

We were amazed to start seeing the mind maps come together.  We discovered another one-third of  jobs that were previously unidentified and were along our hypotheses that there were more social and  identity jobs missing.  We were able to use the team’s collective genius to ensure that the pathways  between neurons (i.e. jobs) were accurate and were then able to overlay which jobs consumers said  were currently satisfied vs. under-satisfied.  Mind mapping allowed us to solidify our current offering, as  well as identify whitespace opportunities.

Approach

After identifying these opportunities, we decided to gather additional primary data to size the  opportunities.  Next is to develop further design criteria based on our mid-term and long-term business  goals, and to create possible solutions to fulfill the consumer opportunities we identified via Design  Thinking and Mind Mapping!

