Abstract:

Developing innovative products and creating different ideas has never been a problem for Unilever. The company spent years and years investing in internal techniques and processes to ensure the development of innovative products for the marketplace. The aim of each launch is always to anticipate trends, or at least keep up with them, since most project development begins two years before their launch. However, testing innovation has always been a problem. Very bold, innovative ideas or ideas that did not make an immediate consumer need explicit were usually rejected, often not because they were irrelevant or uninteresting, but for the simple reason that the consumer was not ready to absorb the information at that time, or because of the language, which was often not the most appropriate or the clearest to explain a given idea.Some alternative techniques were tested for a long time, yet none managed to get beyond evaluating proposed material. More than simply checking whether the idea worked or not, we needed a technique that would build on the ideas with most potential, giving us indications as to how to work them so that they would be more appealing for a launch.It was at that point that Unilever contacted Box 1824, an agency that worked with a different proposition of market segmentation, which directly impacted the evaluation of innovation.