If you have had a baby in the last five years, you will know just what brilliant products Tommee Tippee’s ‘Closer to Nature’ range are.
So we were incredibly excited when their lovely marketing and design team invited us to put together a proposal for a fast-track innovation programme that would unlock actionable insights, stimulate breakthrough ideation and not just generate relevant concepts – but also co-create them into winners.
We knew we needed to go way beyond conventional research if we were going to really step-change the way we met the needs of both contemporary mums and mums to be. We needed to get ‘deep inside the heads’ of our target audience to really start to understand their hopes and fears before birth and unlock the reality of the new-motherhood experience.
We used a week of online ethnography to kick off the process and, once we had really started to get to know our target mums, then we went to visit them in person. We firmly believe there is no substitute for meeting people one-on-one in home, that is what we did, in Charlotte, NC, USA.
We gained masses of deep, empathetic insight that we proceeded to craft into pen-portraits, to help the team better understand their target audience, and creative springboards to inspire ideation.
The combination of actionable insights and creative springboards brought out the best in Tommee Tippee’s cross-functional workshop team and we jointly generated hundreds of starter ideas across the three key stages of the motherhood journey: anticipation, realisation and re-integration.
After a couple of weeks of rapid concept building, we were in a good place for the next step in the process, co-creation …
We are huge believers in the power of co-creation with super-consumers to both spot the most promising ideas, but also rapidly evolve them into real winners with the strongest possible points of difference.
Our teams returned to the USA, to Atlanta this time, for the co-creation sessions. We ran three-hour co-creators with groups of both expectant and recent moms to prioritise and fine-tune the teams thinking. We then quickly concept screened the ideas quantitively.
Less than a month after the co-creators, we were in a position to work with Tommee Tippee’s core team to finalise the innovation pipeline, gain authorisation from the leadership team and start to prepare developmental briefs for the R&D and sourcing teams.
The first launch from this packed pipeline took place in Summer 2015 when the highly innovative Pump & Go concept was launched in the UK & USA to great critical acclaim from bloggers and mothers alike.
Ultra is the second product from the pipeline to be launched globally. Ultra is a unique, new feeding-bottle that not only has a breast-like shape for natural latching and easy switching between bottle and breast – but also has a revolutionary offset nipple design and intelligent venting system that smoothes milk flow and dramatically reduces the risk of colic.
Thanks to the rich insights we delivered – paired with the brilliant design solutions created by the Tommee Tippee team Ultra really is: ‘the only bottle you’ll ever need’.
Working with David and his team has been an inspiring and informative creative journey leading to a number of exciting innovations. The insight gathering stages were the catalyst for the project – interviewing respondents in the home environment and escorting them on shopper safaris allowed the Design and Brand teams to see and hear insights which really shaped future product innovation streams and brand communications. The process Brand Development apply and follow is simple, quick and effective and captures the data in an easily understandable format. Looking forward to working with David and the team again in the future.
Global Head of Design & Innovation at Mayborn Baby & Child
If this case-history has inspired you, and you have similar challenges where our insight, ideation and concept co-creation skills might add value for you – we would love to hear from you
