The innovation dance: 5 principles for customer-centricity

This article is part of a year-long, 25th anniversary series that explores where insight communities have been, where they are today, and the market and customer trends that are shaping where C Space is taking insight communities next.

Creating new products, services and propositions is – by definition – fraught with risk and uncertainty. People like to talk about the 95% of innovations that fail, but that’s probably just a given; there simply isn’t room for every new idea to catch fire.

As we celebrate 25 years of insight communities, we’re also celebrating a quarter-Century of co-creation — collaboration between marketing, insight, innovation and R&D teams to derisk launches. Bringing together the collaborative ethos of co-creation with the longitudinal scope of insight communities creates a brand-consumer relationship cocktail that’s deeper and more evolutionary than traditional stop-start innovation approaches. We like to think of it as a conversation, an agile dance between user and producer, that’s neither customer-led nor brand-led, but a creative back-and-forth.

Mixing the right cocktail isn’t simple, but involving end-users earlier, longer and more creatively is a recipe that’s almost certain to increase your chances of success. And yet, for all the chat about customer-centricity/orientation, we notice daily that businesses talk a lot more about customers in the third person, than they do talking to, or working with, them.

We think that’s a mistake. We’ve identified 5 biases to watch out for, and 5 principles for a more customer-centric innovation strategy.

Read on.

In a recent session at the Global Innovation Forum in London, Diageo shared their analysis of why innovation fails. While poor execution and follow-through is up there, most ideas run aground on the soft sands of poor problem definition (accounting for maybe as much as 70-80%). If you’re not solving a problem for consumers, it’s unlikely your innovation will bring additional utility. Ideas are cheap, solutions to real problems are where the good stuff lives.

Innovation strategies using the latest tech should be making everything better, but it’s often an unhelpful start point. Tech often acts like a black hole, sucking all ideas into its dark embrace. As the app economy boomed, all innovation looked like an app, when the metaverse was hype central, everything suddenly came with a headset, and now AI is ubiquitous, whether or not anyone actually needs it.

So what can we do about it?

– Ethnographic methods help crystallize authentic problems. In one study we identified a tension between ‘inhaling’ snacks on the couch and ‘mindful eating’, that inspired products that tell you when to stop. 

– Insight communities (ideally 4 weeks+) allow us to follow consumer behavior and needs over time, and can overcome the dreaded ‘say-do gap’ if you fold in lifelogging cameras, passive data collection and behavioral data. 

– Seek out ‘customer-inspired problems’, shared opportunity spaces where both customers and business have something at stake, and a joint problem to solve.  

Snow melts at the edges. Change isn’t an inside-out process, it’s not centrifugal.

Disruption’s an over-used term. We prefer what Rita McGrath says in Seeing Around Corners: “snow melts at the edges”. Change isn’t an inside-out process, it’s not centrifugal. It comes from the interstices, and it’s our job to shine a light in some of these places. Starting in the middle simply reflects what we already think, know, assume… it stifles intuition, dampens our bravery.

Customers don’t think in categories, and they don’t care about our ‘stuff’. We constantly have to remind ourselves – and our clients – of this simple truth: we think about our stuff all day everyday, our customers don’t. Paradoxically it’s why they always point out something we don’t see, or won’t see.

But how?

– One effective way to challenge assumptions is through ‘taboo-busting’, deliberately making space to question industry norms, like “buyers are liars”.

– Immersion always enriches our sense of the adjacent possible. Whether that’s bringing out-of-category examples into a sprint, or working with sex toy designers to help Colgate reimagine the toothbrush.

– Work with early-adopters, extreme users and rejectors (our unholy research trinity) and you’ll be rethinking many of your assumptions. In our latest thinking on sustainability, The S-Word, we discovered that the people often leading the most sustainable lives are the most skeptical about the term.

– These approaches are particularly helpful in breakthrough innovation – if you have time, do check out our Foresight Toolkit for Insights Professionals.

Humans are great at problem-spotting. It’s how we’re evolved (to identify dangers) and how we’re raised (‘watch out when crossing the road’, ‘don’t talk to strangers’….). Because businesses are made of people, they’re often highly risk-averse. We find it easier to spot what we can’t do, than imagine what could be.

At C Space we try to celebrate curiosity. We’re inspired by Alice in Wonderland. Just as Alice is up for venturing down the rabbit-hole, peeking behind the curtain or nibbling the mushroom, so innovation requires curiosity, courage, and a willingness to challenge assumptions.

– Build a ‘Yes And’ culture: improvisers are trained to see everything as a gift and to work with what they have. Adopt an additive mindset to help turn off the ‘inner critic’ during ideation.  

– Bring the brief: insight communities thrive when they’re based around topics that members care about, not just our clients’ questions. Make more space for ‘member gen’ activities (aim for 30% of activities or more). It’s how we brought waterproof shoes to Converse, and dog-owner innovations to JLR.

– Try ‘Creative Visualization’ or ‘Imagibuild’: for customers it’s tricky to think ‘future’, they tend to assume negative (not positive) intent from years of siloed experience and ‘computer says no’. If you ask them to build, you’ll overcome the false negatives that tend to dog evaluation work.  

There’s a tendency in business (and advertising) to think we can ‘lead the market’. It’s not really how things work. Stop assuming ‘build it and they’ll come’; it drives ideas we later realize people don’t want and never needed.

In an age of rampant consumerism, the best way we know of doing that is to co-create: involve customers in shaping the problem and building the solution. Make the people who will use your products, and often know them better than you do, part of the team.

In our peer-reviewed research we’ve shown how the typical currency of market research, the incentive, is often the least important part of the value exchange. Find better incentives and everything changes: people become less cynical, less defensive, more motivated.

– Try Big Talk – still the gold standard for expansive, breakthrough, innovation. Most recently it helped us break the rules in travel loyalty for a leading travel brand, GHA (Global Hotel Alliance).

– Love your canvas: for us it’s Miro, but the platform’s not the thing. For our recent work with British Airways, Miro’s the place we plan, brainstorm workshop structure, map out stimulus, interact with aircraft designers, capture concept feedback, and more.

– Widen your aperture. Insight communities are too often deployed as a kind of ‘all-you-can-eat’ buffet of fast feedback. It’s a poor diet for brands and members alike. It’s low on nutritional value, low on engagement, a recipe for bad research and low on inspiration and ideas. Instead, try out community labs, making brand-consumer relationships more 2-way, a genuine partnership between brands and consumers.

The famous New Coke case study reminds us that people don’t live their lives, or consume our products on a one-off basis. So why are so many traditional market research approaches point-in-time only? While synthetic data promises updateable personas and more, there’s also the human version – our conversational paradigm. Research as a relationship.

So what makes a healthy brand-consumer relationship? 

– Think ongoing… innovation comes in phases, it’s evolutionary. Customers need an evolutionary role across stages too. We don’t believe in the one-and-done model for innovation. It’s a recipe for failure. Even for shorter engagements we brief and debrief, we love experiments and pre-tasks.

– Think reciprocal… consider what’s in it for them, and they might be better able to think about what’s in it for you too. Think about the research experience as an exchange: less extractive, more collaborative. Take the time to give back, to share, to include. Make people feel their time is valuable, and valued.

– Think honest… we’ve found that our community and research participants don’t ‘go native’, despite what people fear. They actually become ‘critical friends’, better at sharing authentically, more thoughtful and detailed in their answers, more helpful in what they contribute, more generous with their ideas.

Building lasting relationships with customers isn’t just a feel-good approach, it’s a strategic advantage. Market research isn’t a transaction; it’s an ongoing dialogue that fosters trust, engagement, and breakthrough insights. Remember that human capital is a finite resource. Abuse it at your peril.

We’ve been weaving customers into innovation processes for decades. Talk to us about your innovation dilemmas, how & when to involve customers and how to build a curious and conversational muscle. We’re also cooking up an innovation toolkit with more practical tips and tricks, and hands-on resources. Watch this space.

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