Mungo Dunnett Associates: Management and Marketing Consultancy

Product Innovation

What Mungo Dunnett Associates delivered

A product development exercise too often begins with a somewhat insular discussion of ‘What sort of product can we create?’ – or ‘Who can we find to buy this product we have made?’ – or even ‘What product do we think people will buy?’ This is exactly why the product has become a tired “me-too” in the first place.

We begin with facts. Real insight about the customer base, in the following areas:

1) Who tends to buy from us?

2) What is the profitability of the majority of our recent sales?

3) What do our customers think of us?

4) What do they think of our competitors?

5) Crucially, what do our competitors’ customers think of us?

This is a combination of relatively fast data analysis, and a series of depth interviews – telephone interviews are, in our experience, the most cost-effective way of uncovering real insights into unmet consumer needs, or lingering reasons for consumer resistance to purchase.

The purpose of this initial phase is to provide some robust foundation to the design phase – and to prevent product developers from simply reiterating their existing views.

The next stage is a one-day Product Development Workshop, in which we present a number of case studies of good (and bad) product development, across a range of industry sectors, and consider their implications. The purpose is to challenge preconceptions, and demonstrate that without a robust approach, the product development exercise will simply follow the same pattern – and achieve the same results – as all previous exercises.

The design phase proceeds from this point, with an ongoing process of testing and sense-checking product and packaging activities through individual consumer interviews or focus groups.

By this point we generally find that our clients have absorbed sufficient ‘retail innovation’ knowledge that they are comfortable leading the development work with only occasional workshop or ‘shadowing’ intervention by ourselves.