Using Experts to Mine for Insights & Ideas

Insights and ideas can come from many different places. Of course, brands need to get close to their consumers and understand them. But sometimes it helps to gain a different perspective on your brand from experts. Getting an expert opinion can infuse your branding or innovation initiatives with interesting insights or ideas that you might not otherwise be able to uncover from talking to only to consumers.

There are three types of experts that I might typically work with when crafting of a brand strategy or developing new ideas for a brand:

1. Knowledge Experts

Knowledge experts have expertise in a specific topic. Experts can provide the information you need to understand a specific area you’d like to leverage for new product ideas or for your brand positioning. Experts can explain complex ideas in a succinct manner and help you make interesting connections between the area of interest and your brand.

How to use Knowledge Experts in Brand Strategy:

There are several ways to use knowledge experts depending on your ultimate branding goal. Experts can help you dimensionalize parts of your brand positioning – like the brand benefits or equities. This can be done before or after a brand strategy is crafted. For example, I helped a brand team reposition an Italian liqueur. In addition to speaking with consumers, we conducted expert interviews to dimenionalize potential ways to talk about the brand. We spoke with a dessert chef, a luxury expert, and an Italian travel expert. You can also use experts to help after you’ve crafted a brand positioning. Once you have your brand essence, you can pick experts to help you develop language around your essence to better brief your agency partners.

How to use Knowledge Experts in Innovation:

Experts can help you get deeper insights into innovation platforms. Once you’ve identified the spaces that your brand can play in, you can look for the right types of experts to help the ideation process and inspire new ideas. For example, if you identify an innovation space around ‘helping people get better sleep’, you can talk to different experts in sleep - like a sleep doctor, a director of a sleep institute, an author on sleep, and so on. If you identify an area around ‘delivering high performance,’ perhaps you talk to a professional athlete or a coach, a life coach, an author of performance books, and so on. These experts are sure to illuminate new ways to think of your innovation.

2. Creative Experts

When you are looking for interesting ideas for your next branding project, creative experts can help you solve it. Designers, writers and artists are trained to look at problems in unique ways depending on their area of expertise. They can help uncover and unlock ideas for your brand that can’t be accomplished by internal brainstorming sessions alone.

How to use Creative Experts in Brand Strategy:

There are many ways you can use creative experts to help you crack a brand problem. You might gather a diverse group of Creatives to help come up with activation ideas for your brand based on your brand essence. Or if you are having a tough time getting your brand positioning right, you might solicit the help of artists and designers to help bring your brand to life visually. Once I ran a session with screenwriting students to get deeper into the insights around my client’s consumers and their relationship with their cars. We used storytelling exercises to get to interesting insights that we would not have uncovered by talking with consumers alone. The opportunities to utilize creative experts in brand strategy are endless.

How to use Creative Experts in Innovation:

One of the most popular ways to utilize Creative Experts is to use them to help you come up with ideas for new products. Once I assembled a group of Creatives, including a visual artist and aeronautics expert, a producer, a theater set designer and an industrial designer to come up with ideas for a beverage brand. Because of their eclectic backgrounds, they were able to come up with many diverse ideas which is just what you need for an innovation project. Also, asking a few Creative folks to come up with ideas prior to a larger innovation brainstorming session is a great way to get some interesting stimulus for the session itself.

3. Extreme Consumers

Extreme Consumers are a special type of ‘expert’; they are an expert in your brand or your category. They have a unique perspective about your brand because they have acute needs in the category, and they rely are heavily reliant on it. Speaking with extreme consumers can lead to very interesting insights that might not be as apparent in casual users.

How to use Extreme Consumers in Brand Strategy:

Using Extreme consumers is a great way to gather insights because they have acute needs when it comes to a certain area. They can help you identify greater needs and pain points in your category. For one brand, we spoke to allergy sufferers who needed to have a clear head as part of their jobs. We spoke to an airline stewardess, a professional deep sea diver, a trader and a voice- over actor. Because these individuals couldn’t do their jobs without a clear head, we were able to identify deeper insights for the brand.

How to use Extreme Consumers in Innovation:

Talking to extreme consumers is a great way to help you dimensionalize an innovation platform or to go deeper into a product proposition. For example, if you are looking to deliver better ‘on-the-go’ food solutions, then talk to extreme on-the-go people – like a day hiker or a soccer mom with six kids. If you are looking to innovate in design, then talk to sneaker-heads or home design magazine junkies. Talking with consumers who are passionate about or deeply engaged in a particular lifestyle can help you come up with interesting insights.

Using experts when mining for insights or ideas can be extremely valuable, particularly when a brand already has a lot of intelligence about their consumer. As with other types of research, coming up with the right methodology for using experts is another important consideration. When looking for specific information, one-on-one interviews may be most effective. Other times, holding expert groups be an effective way to for the cross-pollination of thoughts and ideas. Whatever the means, experts can give you great fodder for brand strategy and innovation through their knowledge, creativity or experience.