Building Brand Relevance Through Meaningful Innovation

Leon Zhang

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In the 2018 Prophet Brand Relevance Index™, we identified five themes on how to build brand relevance under the new market landscape by gaining a deeper insight into consumer needs and behaviors, namely:

• Ignite meaningful and tangible innovations;

• Liberate lifestyle with connectivity;

• Enrich experience through curated content;

• Foster happier healthier home;

• Empower global citizens.

Among them, “ignite meaningful and tangible innovations” is the most important pillar for establishing brand relevance within the Chinese market.

The concept of “innovation” is not new. Be it innovation for product, business, model or marketing, whether in FMCG, consumer electronics, retail or even the financial industry, we can always see and hear about innovation from all walks of life. “Innovation” is no longer an abstract concept; it is what all brands believe in, whether the drive is to be competitive or politically correct.

However, innovation can easily be reduced to a resounding, yet empty slogan. In order to win over consumers’ hearts and build brand relevance with them, brands must deeply understand consumers’ needs to create meaningful and pragmatic innovations, rather than innovate for the sake of it or create inconsequential optimization on functionality.

To achieve meaningful innovation, a brand’s priority is to listen to consumers and go beyond.

Listening to consumers is easier said than done. Collecting consumer insights and comprehending their needs systematically is even more difficult.

There is a classic story about consumer insight. The founder of an automotive brand once commented indifferently about consumer insight: “If I asked consumers what they wanted, they would have said they wanted a faster horse, but I created a car.” This story is often used by people who work in innovations as a reason not to conduct consumer research.

But in fact, the important reason why this story is constantly shared is that many lack a true understanding of consumer needs. It’s difficult for the average consumer (not branding expert) to imagine from thin air something that is non-existent or unseen, no matter how much they try to think outside of the box. Naturally, when asked what they want, ordinary consumers tend to express their needs (such as “fast”) by using something they are familiar with (such as a “horse”). In terms of crucial insight, the latter is merely the appearance, while the former is the essence. When understanding consumer needs, you need to see through the appearance in order to perceive the essence, thus the word “insight”. If a branding practitioner focuses solely on appearance, he/she cannot be deemed qualified. 

Gaining insight into consumer needs is the first and foremost step in achieving meaningful innovation.

Consumers’ pain points will always be diverse, and no innovation can satisfy all at once. Moreover, as the market environment continues to evolve, their needs will constantly change, transform and diversify.

For this, we need to continuously gain consumer insights from their perspective when making any innovation. If allowed, multiple in-depth consumer research projects are recommended; when the resource is limited, we at least need to introduce a consumer perspective, to connect the innovation with the actual use case of the consumer. When listening to the consumers, we must methodically identify the underlying drive behind every need.

In other words, innovation originates from consumers, but goes beyond.

The good news is that as technology advances, so does the number of ways of obtaining consumer insights. Be it through traditional quantitative and/or qualitative research methods, or the latest AI-based big data analytics, gaining consumer insight and obtaining necessary resources is much simpler, thanks to today’s diverse methodologies.

Learn more about our Brand Relevance Index™, and how Prophet can help transform your business and capture the heart of consumers.

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