Consumer Obsession™

CONSUMER SPARKS™
How well do you really know and understand your consumer? Is your understanding enough to make a difference in the market place today?

Both quantitative and qualitative research are fantastic for learning and making educated decisions, but does your team really ‘get’ your consumer beyond the data? Can they make decisions quickly without the aid of every single number?

If not, the result is often 'analysis paralysis' – waiting for data that takes too much time and money and only delays your innovation getting to market, and holding up your expected successes.

SPARK offers CONSUMER SPARKS™ a robust consumer obsession program that is custom designed to help you fully understand your target consumer and recognize where and how they are different from other consumer groups.

CONSUMER SPARKS™ and CONSUMER SPARKS TEAM TRAINING™ makes small-scale research and insight development quite feasible on smaller budgets.

With the goal of building their ‘consumer gut,’ your team will ultimately become sharper marketers as they get to know their consumers deeply and more intimately, and have a better feel for making decisions that are right by the consumer and your business.

Marketers walk away from this program energized around creating better products and services for consumers, implementing programs faster, and feeling empowered in their understanding. Additionally, they will understand the difference between observations and insights and may just have the next big idea in mind! Programs can be designed for individual projects as well as for long-term innovation programs.

What might a CONSUMER SPARKS™ program look like?

• For a major client, we took both consumers and marketers on a 'cafe crawl' to explore the world of non-alcoholic beverages. We spent time getting to know the consumers beforehand, on a deep personal level, and learned how beverages fit in to their live – not only practically but also emotionally. We taste-tested beverages along the way and also shared some marketing ideas for feedback. The marketing team was so engaged the experience of working with consumers directly, that they asked all of the consumers to continue to work with us as our LEADERSHIP BOARD for new innovations!
• For a small web start-up, we invited college-aged men & women to join us in a 'web-war', helping us not only get to know them better personally (their hopes, dreams, desires and realities) but also helping us learn what they are exposed to on the web, what works and what doesn't. In addition, we brought in technology, web and youth experts for intimate discussions about the team's start-up plan which helped the team play out different scenarios for success with the target consumer. Ultimately, the start-up made major improvement to both its business plan and web content design plan.

BUILDING INTERNAL COMPETENCY
SPARK also provides CONSUMER SPARKS TEAM TRAINING™ and ‘Train the Trainer’ programs, crafted to empower your team – teaching them how to create and run robust and inspirational obsession programs themselves.

A proven cost-cutting measure, these turnkey programs include inexpensive recruiting methods designed for your organization to provide on-going access to consumers, eliminating the need to hire an expensive company to manage the process every time you want to conduct a session.

New Product Innovation

SPARK is an expert at customized, complete new product/service development and exploration processes and has developed the INNOVATION SPARK™ to help you discover, develop and launch innovations.

The INNOVATION SPARK™ process is always designed with your business objective in mind and starts with a business and consumer or customer review and an assessment of knowledge gaps. It then moves forward with a new learning plan as necessitated by the project objective. Within the program, the team works directly with consumers or customers (see CONSUMER SPARKS™), as well as any new consumer research conducted, and captures the observations that ladder up to consumer insights and concepts to be developed into actionable, executable and measurable marketing and business ideas.

Qualitative Research and Team Workshops

MODERATING
Moderating is about listening – for what people are saying and what they are not. Sometimes they express themselves in other ways than directly with words – SPARK knows how to listen for what consumers are really saying and successfully guides client decision-making through coherent, verbal and well-written, actionable debriefs tailored to their direct decision-making audiences.

While SPARK has significant experience in working with youth – focusing mostly on GenX and GenY, and their parents - our experience encompasses all ages and ethnicities and is inclusive of CPG (food, health & beauty), financial services, and technology. We are skilled in strategic platform development and brand positioning, emotional and functional messaging, as well as tactical consumer checks, inclusive of advertising, briefs and concept development. Highly flexible, SPARK methods range from traditional in-person interviewing to non-traditional online blog and chat moderating. Additionally, as you can gather from our Consumer Obsession™ work, we love connecting with consumers outside of the normal interview locations…at football games, parties, grocery stores, cooking schools, salons, flea markets ...you name it!

BRAINSTORMING
Brainstorming can happen at any time in the innovation and creative development process – upfront in the early stages when you want to develop a plethora of ideas as a starting point, in the middle allowing you to further explore and expand a few focused ideas, as well as at the end when you want to narrow down ideas or discover just how to best market and 'activate' those fantastic insights and products/services you’ve developed.

Leading a brainstorming session takes a lot of organizational and creative juice - and an outside expert can help your team through the challenging process to success. SPARK designs and leads teams through custom-designed exercises to reach actionable ideas that can be taken to market.

CLAIMWEAVING
Haven’t heard of Claimweaving yet?

Have you ever been in a situation when the competitor continues to make claim after claim for their innovations, often directly against yours? Consider conducting a 'Claimweaving' …a brainstorming session to develop claims for your product and against theirs. We already know what '% more' we can claim on pack and in advertising…but what creative missed opportunities of new consumer motivations are still left on the table? Conduct a session and find out!

WARGAMING
This specialized session brings together the experts in your organization to mine existing information on competitors and the competitive market situation as your team prepares to launch a new innovation or re-launch an existing brand or product.

The session is custom designed to meet the team's objectives and often includes product offerings, brand positioning, portfolio design, marketing plans, and communications. It is a team-participatory session, utilizing the 'experts in the room' to explore the knowledge, determine what the competitive response will be and design their own scenario response plans to ensure a successful launch.

FACILITATION
Just want someone else to lead your meeting, herd the cats or inject a much need dose of mega-energy? SPARK provides this just for the purpose of making your life easier. Meeting/agenda design (and chatchkes creation) can also be included! Great for small and large groups, team meetings, retreats, and motivational sessions…just to name a few

Project Management Support

SPARK is your researcher PLUS! Think one-part market researcher, one-part consumer insight expert, one-part brand planner and one-part consumer guru. Said another way – who better to assist you when you have a gap and need someone with experience in all facets of market research to help you design, execute or analyze your consumer insight projects?

SPARK covers the gamut of quant and qual methodologies including segmentations and BASES. We also have expertise in communication development and validation and offer CONCEPT WRITING as well as advertising and communications BRIEF WRITING and DEVELOPMENT to address those needs.

Training

At SPARK we have spent numerous years honing our training skills as leader of a research and marketing teams. We leverage these refined skills in offering numerous training opportunities for both research and brand/cross-functional teams, including:

BASIC MODERATING
Help your team feel more comfortable handling the 'low-hanging fruit' projects in-house, and reducing your research budget overall. Perfect for market researchers, brand managers as well as product developers.

CONSUMER SPARKS™ & CONSUMER SPARKS TEAM TRAINING™
This specialized program is designed for each individual client group as a way to help teams get more in touch with their target consumers and customers. Teams learn how to design programs to meet business objectives, interact with consumers, gather observations, develop insights and insert the learning directly back into their business so that they are not only insightful, but immediately actionable as real business concepts. (see more details under Consumer Obsession™)

INSIGHT MINING AND DEVELOPMENT
IM&D is a focused session teaching teams the ins and outs of hunting through stimuli and observations to find the ‘golden nugget’ insight and then refine it so it’s able to be used to grow a business. This training is designed for teams who are struggling with understanding the difference between an observation and an insight or for team who need further help furthering insight development skills.

CONCEPT WRITING
Collectively, the SPARK team has written more than 1000 concepts for both quantitative and qualitative research – and in multiple formats – 2D, 3D, video, mood videos, etc. This session utilizes our proficiency to help marketers break down their learning to the basics of a concept, and build from the ground up to a useful demonstration of a product or service idea that can easily be assessed by consumers. (see Project Management Support for SPARK concept writing services).

BRINGING INFORMATION TO LIFE or "HOW DO I GET MANAGEMENT TO LISTEN"
Perhaps one of the most over-looked persuasion methods that a researcher or marketer can face is the way they persuade others in an organization towards their brilliant idea – often left to a standard Powerpoint presentation these days. This training is designed to work with individuals and teams to custom design an approach to build support for their ideas within their organization by teaching fundamental and advanced ways of communicating research and marketing ideas to others. It’s not rocket science, but creative and targeted communications – often with a touch of Consumer Obsession™ to get management on-board.

Expert Brains

EXPERT BRAINS is an outside creative infusion – a brain boost to get away from the ‘same old, same old’ and group think in your brainstorms, claimstorms, focus groups and new product development processes. Through our extensive network, SPARK offers access to EXPERT BRAINS – creative people across a multitude of industries, experiences and perhaps from different corners of the world. All insightful and articulate, they bring a different POV and help you think about your tasks and goals differently while pushing the boundaries of your work!

Youth Marketing

SPARK is an expert in youth. Plain and Simple. Whether only focusing on Alison Zelen's personal experience or the entire SPARK network - inclusive of moderators, researchers, agency planners, account directors, and consumer insight leaders – we understand just how to understand them – getting the most learning from interacting with them directly through innovative approaches and methods.

We work with kids, tweens, teens, and twenty-somethings as well as the influencers around them. We’ve not only developed brand strategy, new products, packages and communications to ensure success among this target, but are also advocates for their voice – we want to ensure they are heard in today’s market place.