research services
Strategy Workshops
amplify your
research findings
Your research project is finished, now how do you make the results actionable?
Maybe your team needs to leverage the research to come up with new ideas, strategies, and tactics to appeal to existing customers and convert new customers to your brand? Or, if you just completed a strategic segmentation study, maybe it’s time to bring segments to life to help socialize them with your organization?
We offer a range of tools to amplify your research findings, including facilitated workshops that propel insights into next steps. Our strategy workshops are the perfect solution when you’re ready to turn results into action. We offer a wide variety of workshops based on your business goals.
Learn How We Conduct Strategy Workshops
Our
Strategy Workshops
c+r strategy workshops
powerful options
for your strategic needs
activation workshops
You just finished a research project that uncovered a new, deeper perspective on your category and brand. So, what’s next? How do you make sure your organization benefits from these new insights and assure that they don’t just sit on the proverbial shelf?
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activate your team
Activation Workshops can help your team develop actionable strategies that flow directly from your research. In these in-person or virtual workshops, we slowly move through the research insights, thinking through implications and ideating strategies as we go. Depending on the research findings, the range of outputs is broad – a new product, promotion, communication, merchandizing, training, or other strategic initiative.
ideation
We approach Ideation as a collaboration. Our role is to both guide and push your thinking so that you can develop original, groundbreaking ideas for new products, services, retail concepts, and marketing/communications.
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our approach
Ideation sessions can take place in-person or online. To capitalize on the unique synergy between clients’ category expertise and consumers’ vision and point of view, sessions typically involve both a cross-disciplinary client team and creative-minded consumers called Idea Builders.™
The C+R team designs and facilitates an engaging session that follows the principles of creative problem solving. First, we diverge through rounds of imaginative exercises intended to inspire creativity, stimulate different modes of thinking, and look at consumer insights in new ways to produce fresh ideas. Then, we wrap up by converging the ideas. After the Ideation session, we work with clients to prioritize the ideas worthy of further development based on brand fit, feasibility, and interest.
concept 101 training
Ideas, whether client-generated or identified during an Ideation Session, can be developed into full concepts for testing. When developing concepts, we flesh them out, ensuring that the insight, description, benefits and RTBs tie together and are cohesive, clear, and motivating.
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train and do
The C+R team can develop full concepts, or we can provide training on concept writing best practices through a series of “train and do” workshops. These workshops equip client teams with the skills to write concepts in the future.
opportunity workshops
Opportunity workshops typically precede an Ideation. Workshops allow teams to immerse themselves in research findings and identify and align around strategic opportunities for innovation.
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how it works
Clients walk away from these workshops with an Opportunity Platform. Platforms are written from a consumer perspective and capture opportunities, motivations, frictions, and needs. Opportunity Platforms are not about generating solutions, but rather setting up the problems to be solved; they serve as a springboard for an Ideation, ensuring that new ideas are grounded in consumers’ needs.
Journey Mapping
A journey map visualizes the needs, actions, mindset, and emotions a customer experiences as they engage with a product, service, or brand.
The scope of the journey may span the entire lifespan of a customer’s experience – from awareness through consideration, purchase, and loyalty or abandonment. Or it may be tighter in scope – focused on a specific type of interaction or experience, such as the consumer shopper journey or the onboarding or learning curve with the initial usage of a product or service post-purchase.
We start the workshop by aligning with you on a basic structure for the journey map framework. For example, for each phase, we determine:
- Goals/Objectives
- Behaviors
- Triggers to Next Phase
- Emotions
- Pain Points/Barriers
- Needs/Opportunities
Consumer Journey Map
Out of a journey mapping workshop comes a highly visualized and succinct 1-page map that represents the consumer journey. This visualization helps clients build empathy for their consumers, hone consumer engagement strategies, and optimize the customer experience at each touchpoint in their journey.
micromersions
Consumer speed dating events are a client favorite. These events give clients the opportunity to interact directly with target consumers, either in person or via webcam, through a series of small group discussions. Many use these micro-immersions to better understand specific segments that emerged from a recent segmentation study. Micro-immersions provide tangible access to the target, to cement their needs and characteristics in your mind.
Some of our most popular approaches include:
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Recruiting/Homework
Consumers are narrowly recruited to represent target segments and tasked with homework before the immersion. Homework assignments provide a peek into consumers’ lifestyles, passions, and behaviors. Oftentimes, consumers also create a collage to represent values and category motivations. To ensure that recruits are a true embodiment of the target, we also build rescreening into this process.
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Main Panel
Consumers engage in a group-wide conversation, facilitated by C+R. Stakeholders are in the audience to get familiar with the participants. The questions are designed to uncover what makes each segment unique.
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Speed Dating
Hosted in-person or virtually, clients have the opportunity to talk directly with consumers in small groups. To assure that everyone gets the chance to connect, clients rotate among the small groups throughout the session. Speed dating not only helps your team empathize and understand consumer needs and pain points, but also helps illuminate the differences between segments. C+R Research provides training prior to speed dating events to help clients prepare to get the most out of engaging with consumers.
Proven Experience
featured strategy workshops
case studies & examples
Expert Knowledge
strategy workshops
featured resources
blog
Three Essentials for Successful Brainstorming
blog
12 Tips for Successful Virtual Ideation
blog
Strategy Activation Workshops: A Great Way to Maximize Your ROI on Your Research Dollars
