Innovation that takes its start point from the consumer, but doesn’t take account of the brand, is at best inefficient and at worst detrimental.

 

Think Dove’s body shaped bottles – would this have happened if the team responsible had looked at what real women want, not just generally but from the brand they knew so well?

 

Many corporates today are suffering from innovation overkill: the consequence of Design Thinking without brand thought, or Agile methodology without a long, hard, objective look at equity across its categories.

 

In recent work with two major FMCG companies, we have recommended going back to the brand and its core reason for existing, rationalising existing product developments rather than creating more out of obligation.

 

Many well-known brands today face an identity crisis. Turnover of personnel, restructuring, mergers and acquisitions mean that often, a brand’s history is forgotten. Unsurprisingly, this leads to the absence of critical elements of its DNA, and a brand that is shaping itself only on what is happening around it – not on where it came from.

 

At BigT, we believe it’s only by first exploring the brand – its past, present and future, highlights and low points, relevance and credibility – with rigour and objectivity, that any innovation methodology makes sense.

 

Simply isolating the consumer and capability leads to new product development and, at best, incremental innovation.

 

We need to drill deep into the brand entity (of the yet to be), or equity (of the actual). Only then can we bring the whole sum of the parts together, in a previously unanticipated way – the true essence of disruptive innovation.