The pace of life.

Slow down to become faster: Hectic business world requires shorter and shorter life cycles. But do you spend enough time to think before you run down the hill? Have you planned your project well enough to allow for a round of failure? Are you sure you can succeed shooting in the dark?

I doubt it. Let me start with a translation of a book that has very much impressed me. A chapter of Momo, the girl that saved people from their time being stolen by the grey men. Any idea who in that book the below quote is from?

“You see, Momo,' he told her one day, 'it's like this. Sometimes, when you've a very long street ahead of you, you think how terribly long it is and feel sure you'll never get it swept.'

He gazed silently into space before continuing. 'And then you start to hurry,' he went on. 'You work faster and faster, and every time you look up there seems to be just as much left to sweep as before, and you try even harder, and you panic, and in the end you're out of breath and have to stop - and still the street stretches away in front of you. That's not the way to do it.'

He pondered a while. Then he said, 'You must never think of the whole street at once, understand? You must only concentrate on the next step, the next breath, the next stroke of the broom, and the next, and the next. Nothing else.'

Again he paused for thought before adding, 'That way you enjoy your work, which is important, because then you make a good job of it. And that's how it ought to be.'

There was another long silence. At last he went on, 'And all at once, before you know it, you find you've swept the whole street clean, bit by bit. What's more, you aren't out of breath.' He nodded to himself. 'That's important, too,' he concluded.”

This could be a guidance for project management, don't you think?

Coming from the client side having seen unreasonable timings too often, now having worked with clients for over a decade, you get a feeling when timings are bound to fail from the beginning.

This is especially true for quality improvements. Project leaders are under sever pressure to bring their products to a quality level superior to competition, but they need to deliver within a very short period. Sure this is not new. Failure has happened a few rounds before. But now the pressure is even higher, and the business need to promote the superiority to drive up sales is higher than ever. No way you can stop and think.

No way you can set up a proper test design. De-composing your bundle, re-thinking your intrinsic product, the pack functionality, the emotional cues and the consumer communication.

To understand what are the fundamental drivers of liking already, you need to stop shooting in the dark. You need to explore what is out there in the market, setting up a piece of consumer research whereby your consumers can experience differences and react to it, guided by a trained descriptive sensory panel that evaluate the products in the same way consumers to, that agree on a language to describe all imaginable perceptions and who do an individual assessment of perceived intensities.

Timing, for sure, is important. You want to be fast. You want to get to that level of higher consumer liking as soon as possible, no doubt! Anyway, when you start the project, spending enough thinking, involving all the key functions that are required to be successful, and setting aside sufficent resources and time, all of that looks on the surface like you are slowing down. As a matter of fact, it is the best approach for reaching success quicker.

Recently we find there is proponents promising fast success without proper research. Their sales numbers peak since they are good Marketers of themselves, and their innovative approaches are praised for being new to the world. But where is the substance? What are the decisions based on? Dusted databases? Experts that are neither a representative consumer group nor properly screened and trained sensory panelists? Well, good luck.

If you want to be successful on the long run, properly designed research is the only way. Search for partners with experience in the field which you can trust, partners that you are willing to share the business background with, as well as the technical details of your product development.

They will be at your side from the planning phase through to execution, keeping you involved during the data analysis which is then steered into the proper strategic direction, but also for the reporting and business presentations, still open for adjusting the strategic recommendations and next steps.

And they will still be there to experience harvesting success and celebrating it, and if the first round of research has not been fully reaching the target, they will be open for designing the second one, translating the identified drivers of success into an optimization piece for a final validation.

We are. I am. Ipsos is.