“On every project, the Ideas To Go team has really gotten to know our business to help us maximize both our consumer learning and our team's productivity—in a fun and intuitive way."

Karen Kraft—Senior Consumer Insights Manager

 

BACKGROUND

A strategic shift in 2018 left Johnsonville with an almost empty pipeline. Prior to that, the company was looking at expanding into other meat categories. With new consumer insights and innovation groups forming, Johnsonville began a race against the clock to get things moving against the new strategy. Having focused outside of sausage for many years left their category insights aging, and in need of refreshment. Additionally, Johnsonville knew that cross functional buy-in would be critical to get the pipeline flowing quickly again, once new ideas were generated.

 

OBJECTIVE

Rapidly fill the new product pipeline with lots of great new ideas for sausage.

RESULT

Gather insights, ideate on 4 different major occasions—and quickly fill a 5-year knowledge gap.

 

+ DETAILS

Johnsonville partnered with two different companies: C+R Research to perform ethnographic field work, and Ideas To Go to carry out the ideation and concept development. The three companies worked as a team—along with Johnsonville's ad agency—to collaborate across the project.

Once the opportunity spaces were identified, Ideas To Go's Creative Consumers® associates came in to co-create ideas with the Johnsonville team, across multiple meal occasions. Each ideation session yielded hundreds of ideas. Once ideation was complete, Ideas To Go led the Johnsonville team in converging on their top ideas and writing them into concept outlines. In all, the Johnsonville team was able to fill a 5-year knowledge gap in less than a year.

These sessions resulted in:

  • 3000 new sausage ideas
  • 84 early stage concepts
  • 41 consumer-validated concepts that entered the pipeline
  • 25 active stage gate projects, and counting