Challenge:

I work for a Consumer Goods- Foods company in India with over a 7bn INR in market cap. Needless to  say a large organization (in the Indian context) such as this follows a strict process of “how things are  done”. While I was initially hired to manage a brand that was growing at a steady pace, a year later I was  given the opportunity to revive one of our most profitable yet slow growing brand.

The brand operated in the Sugar-substitute category and though we had 94% market share in the  category (it was basically us and some fringe players) there was very little growth we were seeing year  on year. The reason was that though we were gaining new consumers we were losing 60% of our base  every year

When we conducted consumer research to understand this further, we realized that the consumers  have a very transactional relationship with the brand. They come into the category based on a particular  trigger, (usually on a dietician or doctors’ advice) and then soon drop out after a couple of rounds of  purchase, going back to using regular sugar instead of sugar-substitute.

A deeper reason for this behavior was found in the articulation that, consumers saw the brand a short  term solution provider but not as something to be used regularly as food. This was also because the  product format itself wasn’t like regular crystal sugar but in the form of pellets which made it look like a  tablet and hence medicinal.

Hence we defined our brand objective to positon the brand a regular heathy food product and not as  solution to avoid sugar consumption.

To achieve this we deiced to enter into a range of food categories, with the same benefit of being sugar  free, which were identified through a combination of secondary research and ethnographic research.

Now the challenge at hand was to:

a) Decide the most suitable food categories to enter into   b) Galvanize the cross-functional teams to support and drive the new initiative

Selection: The tool selected to overcome the above challenge was mind mapping.

Mind mapping is an exercise to generate new ideas, at the “What if” stage of the design thinking process  for innovation. It helps identify patterns and insights in the abstract and often disjointed data that is  gathered from various sources. (For more details on the tool please refer to the Week 3 lecture by  Marian moore on Mind mapping in the design thinking for innovation course.)

The reasons for picking this tool were

a) We had large amounts of disjointed data due to our many years of operations on our core

product portfolio and from recent consumer research. Mind mapping helps identify patterns in  such data

b) It is natural for an organization to focus on its highest revenue contributing business. While we

were looking to launch new categories under the brand it was important for us to align all stake- holders towards ensuring that the success of this new portfolio, especially in the initial years  when the revenue contribution would not be significant.

Application:

Step 1: We gathered a cross-functional team of critical stake holders and took them out to resort away  from the city, which we had booked for a full-day conference including some informal activities.

Step 2: We presented the overall challenge faced by the brand and the need for the brand to enter into  new categories

Step 3: We presented the facts from the secondary research on new categories, ethnographic research  on sweetness and the years of quantitative data we had gathered on sweetness as a need state.

Step 4: We then presented the 4 categories in which we could possibly operate and our reasons to do  so.

Step 5: We divided the gathering into 8 groups and asked them to come up with product concepts based  on the data they had seen for all the categories.

Step 6: We asked the groups to present their product concepts to the gathering, followed by a Q&A.

Step 7: We had the concept cards pinned to a board and asked the gathering to individually vote on  each of the concepts.

Step 8: we then asked the gathering to cluster the top product concepts across categories based on their  similarity to other concepts by using sticky notes on which they were written

Step9: We divided the product concepts into separate insight clusters

Insight:

We were able to arrive at the design criteria based on the insight that,   “Avoiding sweetness across product categories drove a wedge among relationships. Its common place  in India to indulge in sweets with friends and family during festivals. Consumers wanted to avoid sugar  and hence ended up not sharing a special moment with their loved ones. Instead of avoid just sugar,  they were avoiding sweetness itself.”

We were pleasantly surprised at how simple yet effective the process was. It was a lot of great work  accomplished but it didn’t see stressful as an activity. We were also much more confident of our way  forward since it had been ratified by every critical stakeholder within the organization.

Approach:

As a future approach I would probably involve the team a lot more earlier into the process, probably  even in the “what is” stage. We also brought them in when we had narrowed our option down to 4  categories. While we avoided discussions outside of these categories, some ideas had merit in them to  be considered. This made us think that bringing in the team together even earlier into the process would  probably have been more helpful.

