When Innovation Fails: Leveraging Qual at Quant Scale for Innovation Success

Navigating the innovation journey is like trying to guide a balloon through a corridor of sharp objects. It’s fragile, surrounded by obstacles that threaten to scupper your plans, and unruly – seeming sometimes to not be within your control at all. More often than not… it pops.

Innovation is the lifeblood of the consumer goods industry. Why, then, does its success rate fall so short, despite substantial research investments? Even though billions are spent on research annually around the world, by all measures your innovation is far more likely to fail than succeed in-market.

At Catalyx, we’ve discovered that the key lies in recognising both the strengths and the shortcomings of traditional research methods. We’ve created our own hybridised approach that bridges the consumer insight gap.

The benefits of qualitative research are huge; getting to consumer truth in the form of feelings, experiences, and authentic reactions. However, this applies only to the small group of respondents you’ve harnessed for your study. These responses are naturally influenced by social contexts, self-monitoring, and the bias of the loudest voice in the room. While the approach yields data of impressive depth on a particular topic, the challenge has become ensuring that it speaks for your consumers – at large.

Making the best of both worlds possible

What if you could eradicate the large blind spot that comes with viewing consumers through a microscope, and instead see your rich qualitative data from a macro perspective? Qualitative insights offer depth into consumer sentiments, but without the breadth that you find in quantitative research, your actionable findings may be accurate only for the few, not the many.

It’s easy to pop the balloon just by setting up your innovation development with a few degrees of error from the get-go.

This misalignment poses a significant risk when designing and launching innovations. While quantitative methodologies require an entirely different approach, contain different pitfalls and yield different results, in our enthusiasm to get a profound quality of consumer responses, have we lost out on the benefits of casting a wide net?

Enter Qual at Quant Scale, an evolved methodology developed by Catalyx through our years of consumer innovation consultancy. This approach combines the beloved richness of qualitative understanding with the robustness of large-scale quantitative datasets. Its unique value is that it enables a truly holistic view, ensuring that innovations are not only designed with precision but also resonate with your broader consumer base.

How Qual at Quant Scale is meeting market needs

In rising to our clients’ challenges, time and again we’ve seen (and proved) that this is not only possible, but hugely beneficial to the quality of your innovation development. We’ve harnessed the power of Qual at Quant Scale to unlock over $1billion in growth for clients in just 10 years. With this methodology, we’ve been able to create tangible progress for innovations that launch to meet and surpass consumer expectations.

Whether it’s identifying unmet consumer needs or fine-tuning product attributes, at its core, this approach transforms data into a holistic and strategic asset rather than just a fragment of the bigger picture.

How Catalyx activates the power of truly representative data

In practice, it’s not a shift to quant, but simply the optimal expansion of qual.

The success of our award-winning approach is based in Catalyx’s Consumer Understanding System. Whether launching a new product or optimising an existing one, our proprietary Consumer Understanding System gives us our ability to activate comprehensive groups of a client’s target consumers. Anywhere in the world, any group of people, for any insight purpose; it gathers the qualitative data at huge scale, processing thousands of multimedia consumer datapoints with all the richness you’d expect. This is then combed through by our AI-powered technology to extract emerging themes, fast. That means no compromise on efficiency and accuracy every time.

This approach works. Especially in today’s consumer landscape, marked by rapid evolution and hard-to-predict preferences, understanding the multifaceted needs of consumers demands an enhanced perspective. This is how you can focus not just on collecting vast data, but ensuring it’s truly representative from the start. Only from there can brands benefit from distilled actionable insights that guide every step of their innovation journey.

We believe that when innovation fails it’s a call to reassess the tools and methodologies at our disposal. Rather than adhering to a black-and-white one-or-the-other approach, Qual at Quant Scale is the way forward. This is how businesses can design the right thing, the right way, the first time – and the proof is in the impact. As the industry continues to evolve, embracing Qual at Quant Scale is not just a choice but a strategic imperative for those seeking to thrive in the competitive landscape.

Ready to innovate with confidence?

We hope you’ll join us at our talk on this topic, “When Innovation Fails: Why the Industry Needs Qual at Quant Scale to Design the Right Thing, the Right Way.”

We’ll be delving into case studies and demonstrating the effectiveness of this methodology. If, in the meanwhile, you’d like to know more about our approach and what it can mean for your innovation, get in touch with our team today.

Catalyx is a Consumer-centric Innovation Consultancy. We help the world’s most forward-thinking consumer product companies unlock progress through more effective innovation.

If you would like to hear more about the use of big data in qualitative research, check out the upcoming Qual360 Europe and North America editions. All quoted speakers will present live at the Qual360 Europe edition on February 22&23 in Berlin.