IDEATION 03: 4 standard scenarios to kick-off research

Any research starts with setting a problem. You’ll be ready for ideation once you determine your business problem + your specific situation/scenario.

Since I like to classify everything (hopefully this is not a diagnosis), I did some thinking and came up with 4 possible situations for ideation:

You need to feel out consumer needs in your chosen direction.

For example, you want to develop an app with recipes. Then your territory is “cooking at home.” You need to dig into the needs of people existing within this territory. This will help develop a product idea based on people’s needs, maximizing the chances of its success even at the idea stage.

You need to feel out whether there is a potential (or threat) for your business in any external world phenomenon or trend.

For example, you are a manufacturer of healthy foods. Have you noticed that the topic of body positivity has been trending lately? You want to dig deep into this topic to understand what people really mean by the concept and perhaps come up with an advertising campaign idea or an idea for a special “body positive” product line.

You have a rough idea. You need to develop it, fill it with specifics, and formulate it clearly.

For example, you are a manufacturer of chocolate bars. You have an idea to sell multipacks. You want to feel out the associated needs. This will help you come up with a more “correct” idea for a multipack and talk about it so that people will want to buy it.

You have a problem - an important business metric does not meet expectations. You need to understand what the problem is and how to fix it.

For example, you run a service for conducting webinars. Freemium is doing well, but paid plans are selling worse than expected. You want to discuss with users why they don’t switch to paid plans and, conversely, why they do switch. This will allow you to formulate hypotheses about barriers and drivers, clarify needs and, possibly, adjust the product or marketing.

Each of these scenarios is characterized by a certain research subject and the expected results. Let's spell them out for clarity: