CASE STUDY
Expert Placement
Skill mapping of large, international companies focus’ on day-to-day operations when establishing head count. During a growth initiative this can result in skill bottlenecks, especially when fine tuning a proposition in an adjacent category or a new geography. Traditionally the R&D function will focus on the product development and less on testing of product usage over a wide range of consumer or customer applications. However, fine tuning of a proposition in a new context requires exactly such in depth understanding to crystalise the functional and emotional benefits. This ‘product usage or application’ expertise is not required on a daily base, once the usage and benefits of a product are understood and clearly communicated in marketing material and by the sales team.
InnoMotion preparations for the execution of a growth opportunity highlighted the need for product application testing to screen rapidly a portfolio of 50+ products for a new usage to exploit a growing new trend.
Problem:
Specialist ‘application’ skills to fine-tune a new proposition
Solution:
Short term expert deployment
Action
Recruitment: InnoMotion tapped into its vast network of specialists and identified two suitable candidates who were available on a freelance basis. Jointly with the client one candidate was selected and brought into the team for two short bursts of activities.
Testing: InnoMotion rented external facilities and worked with the client to select and ensure client product availability. During the planning phase, the expert devised jointly with the client R&D, marketing and sales team, the performance criteria developed for documentation of results, which included photography. Several hundred tests were conducted in two testing cycles of three days. On each third day, the client team joined for repeat tests of the front runners for knowledge transfer, joint product selection and proposition development with the client.
Result
The expert enabled testing to be carried out rapidly due to the extra capacity, and also to devise product usage based criteria for future customer marketing material.
The tangible outputs were the selection of the client products most suitable to customer needs, backed up by specific functional and emotional benefits with quantified reasons to believe, documented in deployment ready photography. Read the ‘Selling Story’ case study, which followed this expert deployment.