Generating new products, services and marketing implementations can be a lengthy and daunting process. DRI offers programs that accelerate the development cycle, both for bringing new products to market and for evaluating and revitalizing current business strategies.

These programs are grounded in structured meetings that have the express objective of producing usable results. These sessions:

	Are led by a trained DRI facilitator whose task is to move the process along toward a clearly defined and agreed-on goal.
	Foster creativity via exercises that encourage participants to view the subject in different ways, from different perspectives.
	Treat all participants equally and all ideas as "fair game" so that the group works as a team to find relevant solutions and establish key action steps.

	Create new products in particular categories
	Position products/services
	Build market-focused growth strategies
	Extend product/brand lines
	Name new products
	Develop advertising and promotional concepts
	Provide direction for organizational development

These notes are organized in an easy-to-read format and constitute the basis for next steps such as creating concept statements for qualitative testing.

Creative Consumer Workshops

A Dialogue for Innovation

Consumers are often asked to participate in a company’s new product/service and marketing program development process, generally through well known market research techniques including surveys and focus groups. These methods traditionally do not engage the consumer directly with those in the company responsible for new product design, process innovation, and new advertising campaigns. Rather, management remains “behind the glass” (literally or figuratively) as observers.

In an era when open-source software development and on-line communities are common, a direct dialogue between consumers and product developers can lead to unexpected but highly desirable innovation. It is with this in mind that DRI offers the Creative Consumer Workshop to its clients. In contrast to the "typical" consumers ordinarily sought for market research, for these sessions a panel of consumers expressly screened to meet certain thoughtfulness and creativity critera is recruited to work with client team members in the same room.

The Program

Generally, we schedule two or three workshops with creative consumers and the management team. Following this, the Facilitator’s Easel Notes are produced and distributed to the client team – usually within three days. Then an internal strategy session is conducted by the facilitator to collectively share findings and decide on implications and next steps. Before this session, it is expected that client participants review the notes from the consumer sessions and earmark issues and ideas of importance to them, amplify on comments, and sketch out implementation of next steps.

The Benefits

The process of interacting with creative consumers in facilitated ideation sessions, combined with output captured, organized and shared quickly in a facilitated client strategy session, opens up a new level of possibility for product, service, or marketing strategy development. The roles and contributions of both categories of participant are stretched for maximum productivity, and the process is highly disciplined and tightly managed to achieve optimal results.

For more on the topic of how we recruit respondents for our Creative Consumer Workshops, see the following articles published in Marketing News by Nino DeNicola:

 "Find best participants through use of pre-groups" - Marketing News, May 15, 2007

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