Judging skincare ideas from three brands by one standard

The question

A personal care company had three skincare brands feeding ideas into one innovation pipeline. It wanted the strongest to go forward, whichever brand they came from.

That needed a standard all three brands could accept. Many of the ideas also had to work twice over, for adults choosing for themselves and for parents choosing for their children, and the company wanted to know which ideas were ready for development and which needed more time.

Our approach

We set the bar before anything was measured: every concept, from every brand, faced the same stated benchmarks in a quantitative test, read separately for adults and for children.

Each brand’s team first chose its candidates from a shared bank of ideas, and we sharpened them in qualitative sessions with adults and parents, so the test measured each idea at its best.

Appeal was treated as one gate among several, set beside feasibility and time to market, because a skincare idea people like still has technical, regulatory and commercial checks ahead of it.

What the team came away with

Ideas from every brand could now be compared against one bar, with the same evidence behind each.

One report brought it together: the benchmark definitions, recommendations on the concepts, and one innovation roadmap across the brands, with each concept placed by its readiness and the development time it would need.

The earlier stages stayed with the team as well: the opportunity areas the ideas grew from, the shared idea bank and the refined concepts, ready for the next round of development.

Because every brand’s ideas had faced the same people on the same terms, the brand teams could argue for their concepts on common ground.