Building A User-Centric Roadmap For Innovation With Nature’s Care
Problem
Nature's Care (the third largest Supplement company in Australia with a strong presence in the Chinese market) entered a new phase with its transition from private ownership in 2018.
Entering 2019 with a new exec team and ambitious growth targets, they needed to overhaul their historical innovation process and build a long-term pipeline FAST, with “Fewer, Bigger, Better Innovations”.
How To Impact was engaged to partner with the internal innovation function; supporting capability and process design while simultaneously delivering a targeted discovery project that would:
Define the key opportunity spaces for innovation across Australia and China
Establish insights and rules of engagement that could unlock them
Create a validated blueprint for solutions to take through to launch.
Methods
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We needed to prioritise ‘bigger bets’ and move away from an overcrowded roadmap of tactical, fast-follower NPD ideas that had historically clogged the pipeline.
First, we undertook a comprehensive audit of drivers shaping the future of the VMS (Vitamins, Minerals and Supplements) category across both the Australian and Chinese markets – and synthesised our findings into 8 Overarching Opportunity Spaces that would inform a more granular end-user Deep Dive.
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From our earliest ideas, we adopted a prototyping methodology based around three tenets of desirability, feasibility, viability.
Much like a science experiment – our focus was on defining our assumptions, pulling apart distinct hypotheses, bringing them to life with rough prototypes, and testing and evolving them in quick succession.We immersed ourselves in the world of the consumer, putting ourselves in their shoes, finding real human stories and powerful unmet needs – spending over 125 hours in face-to-face immersive research activities with end-users, with more than 80 consumers engaged across both Australia and China.
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Our deep understanding of end-user behaviours and motivations allowed us to build a clear view of the Shopper Journey and evolve from traditional demographic profiling to a more meaningful segmentation; built around 2 distinct Wellness Mindsets and 4 distinct Life Stages.
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Moving fast meant adopting a hybrid approach that blended end-user discover with technical fact-finding and supplier engagement at every stage of the process. By creating a rapid feedback loop between Desirability (consumer problems to solve) and technical Feasibility (what we could actually deliver), we ensured that every opportunity and idea explored was grounded in commercial reality… and accelerated the development roadmap from concept to execution at the same time.
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At solution design, we thought beyond ‘product’ and developed integrated idea platforms that encompassed multiple types of innovation and stretched across horizons with short-term (incremental) and long-term (disruptive) plays.
Outputs
The engagement formed a comprehensive strategy for growth, encompassing:
Validated long-term Opportunity Map & needs-driven Insight Platforms to solve for
A new Consumer Segmentation and Customer Journey toolkit
4 disruptive Idea Platforms along with a raft of tactical and supporting ideas
An Innovation Pipeline and Roadmap for development with consumer-informed Executional Guardrails
Impact
The first product platform off the roadmap launched into Chemist Warehouse stores in late 2019 – less than 6 months from project completion and under a year from the initial project engagement.
The Healthy Care ‘Multi-Actives’ range breaks away from the one-size-fits-all conventions of traditional multi-vitamins; with tailored lifestyle formulas that deliver exactly what each individual needs in their life (and nothing they don’t).