Today - at the Online Research Methods conference in London - Affinnova, Inc., the global leader in marketing innovation software and services, introduced Affinnova Concept Studio, a web-based application that accelerates concept collaboration and development for new products, designs and ad campaigns.
Concept Studio helps marketing teams create concepts by capturing and managing ideas in a shared visual workspace. The application allows users to easily create an "innovation space" for a vast range of potential marketing concepts, including branding, positioning, imagery, benefits, messaging and packaging.
Concept Studio supports divergent collaboration, encouraging users to submit a wide variety of alternative ideas. While many innovation systems prematurely drive teams towards consensus, the Affinnova innovation platform leverages the divergent ideas that are more likely to produce genuine breakthroughs. Users can share concepts in real time to cast a wide net for ideas, even inviting outside vendors, such as advertising agencies or consultants, to collaborate.
Concept Studio is the new front end to the Affinnova innovation platform and is seamlessly compatible with Affinnova´s evolutionary optimization. Rather than select a few concepts to test, the marketing team can get consumer reaction to concepts from throughout the innovation space, using this feedback to rapidly find the top concepts with the greatest appeal. Evolutionary optimization triples the likelihood of outscoring the leading competitor.
Nutrisystem, Inc., the leading home delivery weight loss program, was one of the first to utilize Concept Studio to optimize messaging for a new program. "Our challenge was to bring a program to market that leveraged our strengths and also broadened our proposition across key segments," said Tony Perlak, Senior Vice President, Marketing for Nutrisystem. "By working with Concept Studio, we were able to effectively identify the optimal product and messaging attributes needed to accomplish that goal."
"Collaboration to develop breakthrough innovation has always been challenging, and failing to overcome those challenges often results in incremental innovation. Concept Studio facilitates the best practices that produce breakthrough innovation," said Waleed Al-Atraqchi, President and Chief Executive Officer of Affinnova. "By linking Concept Studio with our proven evolutionary optimization technology, we have created a seamless process that will allow our customers to innovate with higher success rates, in shorter time frames and at lower cost."
About Affinnova
Affinnova is a high-growth software and services firm that enables innovative companies to drive better ideas to market faster. Unlike conventional market research, our patented survival-of-the-fittest approach has the capacity to explore extremely large idea spaces by applying evolutionary search algorithms to product and marketing innovation. Global Fortune 500 companies, including Procter & Gamble, Unilever, Nestlé, PepsiCo, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Walmart and Citibank, depend on Affinnova to deliver accelerated launch timing and higher success rates. For more information, please visit www.affinnova.com.
