- Unilever: The Top Clean Team: Laundry Innovation
THE CHALLENGE:
Synecticsworld worked with the Unilever team to not only help the company re-invent their laundry products category, but also to build an innovation funnel that Unilever employees throughout the world could connect with to champion ideas.
THE PROCESS:
The Synecticsworld-led Unilever team, made up of 42 representatives from 11 countries, worked for two-and-a-half days.
On Day One they:
- Learned Synecticsworld’s tools and techniques
- Began generating initial ideas
- Explored consumer segments
- Exposed some of their individual, consumer-related stereotypes
On Day Two:
- The main group broke up into eight smaller groups and visited the homes of consumers while the Synecticsworld team floated between the locations providing facilitation and coaching where necessary.
- The group combined the insights they had just developed with the starting ideas from the previous day.
- The afternoon was spent on idea development and using creativity as a means of enriching the concepts.
Day Three brought new consumers into the process and used their insights and perspectives to build the existing ideas into even better ones. The groups had an opportunity to take the feedback from consumers and work-up the concepts once more before sharing the ideas in a marketplace with the entire group.
What emerged was a highly energetic, charged group who had collaboratively developed an innovation funnel of new and exciting insight-based ideas. And were prepared to drive selected concepts in their individual markets.
THE RESULTS:
After the workshops, the Synecticsworld-led team presented their work at two separate meetings, one with Unilever marketing managers and directors, and the other with laundry category executives.
“Both meetings went very well and our approach to innovation and the ideas themselves were enthusiastically endorsed… I hope you are helping others realize their work dreams,” affirmed Toffael Rashid, Unilever.
