Creativity Based on Solid Consumer Research

The project was given the name ˜˜Gamebreaker. This was indicative of the teams mission, which was to break all of the rules of the current game and come up with something truly revolutionary. The key internal players included the director of marketing, the head of market research, and experts from the plant that would have to implement the production side of the venture. External players included the advertising agency, consultants , and a design group .

An initial step was to learn something about the behavior of the core consumer group. The distribution of hearing aid battery consumers is heavily skewed toward the aging population. Approximately 70 percent of these consumers are seventy-five years of age or older. A form of observational research was conducted in assisted living centers. Hearing aid users were brought into a room in each assisted living center for this research. A moderator asked questions and guided their activities while key members of the team observed .

Respondents were asked numerous questions about their hearing aid batteries. They were asked what they liked and disliked about these batteries. They were asked specifically how they went about changing the batteries. They were asked what they felt was important to them in hearing aid batteries. They were then asked to actually change their hearing aid batteries while the team watched. As this process unfolded, the team began to develop ideas and new product concepts.

A series of store checks were conducted to help stimulate creative ideas. As members of the venture team visited different types of retail stores, they looked at products from a broad variety of different product categories, paying particular attention to all of the types of packaging and in-store merchandising that were used. They looked at breath fresheners, health and beauty aids, and food and nonfood products. If a unique package provided a solution, or just stood out, the product was purchased and brought back for further analysis. The idea was to maintain a creative environment and to think outside of the box.

The results of all this research were brought into a series of brainstormingsessions for the purpose of coming up with ideas covering the whole area of hearing aid batteries and packaging. The idea was to find solutions to any negatives that could be identified, and to leverage existing ideas from other categories. These brainstorming sessions involved the companys internal people, an audiologist, and some key people from outside the company with different backgrounds and skills.

At this point a series of focus groups were held with hearing aid users to learn more about their behavior, to identify the details of any problems they might be having, and to test some of the key concepts developed thus far. These groups were held in several cities, such as Tampa and Phoenix, that had a sizable elderly population. Concepts were refined as the researchers went from one group to another. A total of twenty different hearing aid concepts were tested with consumers during these focus groups.