At this stage, we help you generate unique but commercially-oriented ideas off the back of opportunity areas and create fully articulated visual and written concepts. Importantly, we make sure your team is taken along the journey and onboard to continue with the innovation project.
We use techniques that get you to break your current frame of reference and think beyond the category and product innovation. We’re believers in bringing early ideas to life as much as possible using experiential techniques, early prototyping and in-situ testing. And no matter what, we keep the initial market need and opportunity in mind.
Here, we offer solutions across:
Agile approaches and prototyping to bring our ideas to life.
Facilitation and tools that yield really new offers to ‘wow’ consumers.
Experiential, behavioural and in-situ methods (even at this early stage).
We’re pretty proud to call Australia’s largest sensory testing lab home. Our best-in-class sensory & shopper facilities and tools like eye tracking & 3D prototyping help bring your innovation to life. You (and your consumer) will get a glimpse of the end product in a real-life scenario. We can even mock up an entire physical or digital supermarket aisle, letting test subjects experience your product just like they would in-store.
We reached out to the PLAY team to conduct some rapid idea screening on a bulk set of concepts as part of our innovation development. The account team were extremely knowledgeable regarding the right methodology to use and were very flexible with adapting the approach to suit our specific business needs and ensure we get the most value out of the research. PLAY was true to their timelines and delivered a succinct report and debrief that has now been leveraged to inform our licensing innovation strategy. I would highly recommend PLAY for any consumer led innovation research and look forward to using them in the future.
Having worked with PLAY for a number of years now, we have established a great working relationship. They are a well-respected and highly regarded business partner, adding significant value to our organisation by contributing to and identifying the best ways to unlock future growth for the portfolio, brand and innovation plans. From large scale discovery & strategic insights, through concept & claims development, and sensory proof points – the PLAY team have been a part of our transformation journey, delivering robust and flexible options for the MARS business. PLAY offer inspiration and consultancy outside of the day-to-day project work, and are willing to challenge, and collaborate, on the best ways to achieve our insights and innovation goals.
We engaged with PLAY to help understand what truly drove the choices for ‘dinner’ amongst the broad Australian audience. We needed a foundational study to inform action across a wide product portfolio - for both current rationalisation, review, and future scoping & innovation. The approach was a great mix of robustness, efficiency and defensibility – enabling the final data to be cascaded across the business in ways that were both creative and engaging, as a result of the insights provided. We were able to action this expansive research not just in terms of brand and portfolio decision making, but also as a tool to gain alignment across several divisions of the business and to internally speak a consistent consumer-based language. This fundamental study informed the business at many points of the consumer journey to dinner and continues to be the study that keeps on giving 3 years later, due to the art and science in which the study was executed, analysed and database built.
A leading Australian dairy and food company wanted to test out a heap of ideas, fast while keeping costs down. Luckily, that’s exactly what we’re good at. Our team deployed an approach that quickly surveyed shoppers and produced a hierarchy of ideas – some of which were turned into actual products!