Martha Guidry, The Concept Queen, describes a unique usage of qualitative research for concept development.

1. 30 backpage { how I did it }
With this issue,
marketingnews 07.30.09
Martha Guidry
Marketing News launches
a new Backpage concept.
We are contacting
leading marketers and The Rite Concept, Avon, Conn.
AMA members and
asking them three Also known as “The Concept Queen,” Martha Guidry is principal of The
questions; we will feature Rite Concept, a brand management, concept development and research
their answers, in their
consultancy. She has launched new products for brands such as Noxema
own words, here. Our
and My Little Pony, and her clients include Arby’s, The Hartford Finan-
hope is that you
find inspiration and cial Services Group, Timex and Pfizer. She spent six years in consumer
useful takeaways in the marketing at Procter & Gamble and Hasbro, and earned her M.B.A. from
experiences of your
Harvard Business School. AMA member since 2004.
fellow marketers.
Q: What is your greatest marketing
accomplishment? How did you strategize
“This process has been a big favorite for my clients.
and execute it? How did you measure
your success? It teaches them to listen to their customer and write
A: I’ve enjoyed working with a lot of
different clients across a wide variety of
winning positioning concepts based on customer feedback.”
industries, helping each of them create
winning new product and service concepts the standard, feature-laden concept pulled During Days Three and Four, we
in the marketplace, but the most exciting directly from the science lab. conducted a series of iterative phone mini-
marketing accomplishment was help- In this herbicide category, a single groups with the growers. The goal of these
ing my client, DuPont, reposition a line competitor has owned the market for the groups was to identify the lead bene-
of commercial herbicide products. In past 10 years with the product Round Up fit approaches and optimize the consumer
five short days in October 2008, we took (the commercial version of the stuff you’d insight, all while listening for reason-to-
a product with almost no muscle and buy at Home Depot). We needed to find believe (RTB) language that would support
turned it into a real market contender with enough white space in the market to serve the claims. The team carefully listened and
genuine traction in the marketplace. How up DuPont’s product in this practically reworked the concepts after each round
did we do it? It was by carefully crafting a single-player market. Further complicat- of research, building and then converging
benefit-focused positioning concept incor- ing matters was DuPont’s history of relying on lead approaches with continual guid-
porating customer input versus relying on almost exclusively on R&D to provide the ance and coaching by The Rite Concept.
content for the marketing process, resulting Compelling RTBs were crafted through a
in a series of product-focused, kitchen-sink similar process.
concepts that basically focused on features, On Day Five, these lead concept ideas
the marketing of which led to very lacklus- were modified by incorporating the retailer
ter results in this saturated market. perspective. It was adding this “voice of the
From a strategic standpoint, it was crit- retailer” that ultimately helped persuade the
ical to understand that appealing to two market to actually stock the product and
targets was key to a successful sell. If we then make the sale to growers.
were ever to identify a marketing oppor- While the concept was not tested quan-
tunity, we needed to better understand the titatively, the effort was perceived as a
purchasing drivers for the growers and success. It was the first time in a decade
then, while maintaining grower appeal, that the team had been able to create an
tweak the concept in a way that persuaded ownable, single-minded proposition that
the retailer to sell the product to the grower. separated the product from other weed kill-
Day One saw us conducting a number ers. The sales members on the team excit-
of qualitative, one-on-one phone interviews edly brought the results to the larger sales
Guidry’s ConCept developMent ForMulA with growers, supplemented with an online force, energizing them to start talking about
interface that allowed for creative projective their products in a persuasively new and
1 Identify the appropriate targets, talking to them many times
in a condensed time frame. exercises to identify the perceptions, beliefs
and emotion around killing weeds, not just
different way.
The process (outlined to the left) is flexi-
2 A committed, fully cross-functional team should be involved
in all parts of the iterative and writing process.
the obvious functional necessity of accom-
plishing the task.
ble and can be tweaked for almost any type
of product or service.
On Day Two, the entire team culled This process has been a big favorite
3 Train and coach the team to be equipped with strong
concept writing skills and knowledge. At each step in the
development, just-in-time concept training modules help the
through the telephone data and ideated
different benefits that the products could
for my clients. It teaches them to listen
to their customer and write winning
offer, based upon the previous day’s learn- positioning concepts based on customer
team learn about the specific pieces of the marketing concepts
ing. Additionally, the team identified multi- feedback. Plus, the entire team buys into
they are creating.
ple customer insights that were used to the results because they were all involved
4 You need more than just your standard moderator. Find
one with significant concept writing expertise to fully
create compelling “hero” benefits. (All of
this activity is easy to say, but it is much
with the entire process, allowing them
to sincerely and enthusiastically cham-
how I did it//bp
equip the team, and shepherd the process and audit the work more difficult to accomplish than you pion the output when they returned to
with objectivity. would think.) All this information became their respective functional areas. It is a
the input into mini-concepts that would be win-win for everyone—and it only takes
shared with the growers for feedback. five days! m