Finding where a services group could innovate in well-being

The question

A consumer services group wanted its new ideas to start from people’s lives, and chose health and well-being as the first territory to explore.

The territory runs from sleep and fitness to mental health, nutrition, sex and illness, and it cuts across the group’s businesses, so its new ideas had to as well. The aim was to find where needs were least well served, and how teams from across the group could build propositions there together.

Our approach

We designed the exploration around how confident people felt with technology and with a sensitive subject, so each person chose how to take part.

The work started broad and then went deeper, and between the stages a working session with the client team chose where the second stage should dig.

A review of the group’s past research and trend work, with interviews with its stakeholders, kept the opportunities tied to what the business already knew and wanted.

What the team came away with

The evidence was shaped into opportunity areas: the spaces where needs were least well served and the group could innovate.

We debriefed through participants’ own films and photographs. Maps of how needs change with people’s circumstances stayed with the teams as posters, and a podcast series gave colleagues another way to hear the research.

In a workshop fed by the debrief, people from across the group’s businesses built on one another’s ideas from a shared customer territory. The ideas were prioritized and captured on proposition templates, each setting out how the proposition would work, how it would make money, and the needs and benefits it would put first.

It was the first time the group had developed ideas from a customer’s life territory, with no single product or business unit as the anchor.

“This work is a demonstration of how insight and ideation should work: agency and client working hand-in-glove to take potential above and beyond where any of our stakeholders could even imagine was possible. I couldn’t be more delighted.”

Chief Customer Officer, consumer services group