Making Innovation Success More Predictable

Innovation Success: Making It More Predictable

Innovation success is crucial, yet 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… the balloon 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 the market.

Most research begins in qual, or quant. At Catalyx, we’ve discovered that the key lies in recognising both the strengths and the shortcomings of both of these traditional research methods. We’ve created our own hybridised approach that bridges the consumer insight gap, and this approach has unlocked 25x ROI for our clients.

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? The benefits of qualitative approaches 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.

Without the breadth of a wider dataset that you find in quantitative research, your actionable findings will be accurate only for the few, not the many. However, quantitative methodologies require an entirely different approach, contain different pitfalls and yield different results.

It’s clear to see how easy it is to pop the innovation 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.

Enter Qual at Quant Scale, the methodology used by Catalyx and evolved through our years of consumer innovation consultancy. This approach combines the richness of qualitative with the robustness of quantitative. Its unique value is that it enables a truly holistic view, ensuring that innovations are not only designed with precision, but fully resonate with your target 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 the way to turn innovation success from a possibility, to a probability.

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 on Catalyx’s Consumer Understanding System. Whether launching a new product or optimising an existing one, we combine this proprietary system with the Catalyx Elevation Process™ which levels up the data into a story, in turn creating the actions that clients can take immediately to drive progress. This is what gives us our ability to activate comprehensive groups of a client’s target consumers – in-depth. 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-enabled mixed-method data processing with expert humans at the helm. Using this, we extract emerging themes, fast. That means no compromise on efficiency and accuracy every time.

This is the mixed methodology approach that secured a milestone launch for our client Organix, with a new range of baby food offerings. When faced with the problem in-category of a ‘sea of sameness’, the avenues for successful innovation seemed to be dead ends. Brands had been recreating the same formula again and again instead of re-centring the consumer at the heart of their product development process, and the result was a homogenous range of offers that were failing to meet the needs of today’s parents.

By capturing the qual necessary to gain exact consumer truths and emotional responses, at quant scale to ensure that the insights were validated across thousands of different parenting preferences and needs, we were able to get to the core drivers and demands that unlocked the path to an award-winning range.

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, “Making Innovation Success More Predictable.”

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