Intensive ideation for food and drink

Scale, depth and intent. Creative workshops & full pipeline programs are built out of strategic need, grounded in the business’ commercial objectives across a medium to long term horizon. They take time to frame, build and execute as they require large cross functional or multi market team involvement, challenge framing & quite often, deep consumer exploration, data mining & platform building rigor. A hothouse is far more agile & execution led; it prioritizes speed & outcome above process & stakeholder engagement. It’s great in responding to a variety of tactical challenges such as accelerated briefs from customers, time sensitive trend & culturally relevant opportunities, tactical sales opportunities, tender requests or simply to inject a totally different level of creativity into your chosen category.

The short answer is no. A typical Hothouse requests all of the discovery inputs up front and our team spend time with you to ensure we’re clear on what you need. From we decide what our prioritization metrics should be. We don’t want to go away for 2-3 weeks creating concepts that are off brand or brief so we’re very clear on the ideation guardrails going in. When we hand over your concept list, you can be sure we prioritized only the strongest ideas for the right reasons.

If volume ideas is actually what you need, our hothouse plus is better suited to respond to this. It takes an additional week but your output includes ALL of the idea statements we produce, not just the concepts we prioritise. It also adds in a layer of consumer centricity to it via our idea arena testing method. We generate 40-50 idea statements, test this with 2000 consumers via our online panel & then use this alongside your prioritization criteria to build the top 10-15 concepts. We find that for mass market brands and categories, this is a much better way of generating commercially successful ideas as it builds in that consumer touch point. Conversely, our standard Hothouse approach better suits categories that require disruption & newness, perhaps with the job being to attract new customers into the fixture or store.

A standard hothouse is 2-4 weeks, with a hothouse plus taking approx 4-5 weeks. Our recommendation is always to unpack on the scoping call your specific needs & context so we can point you in the direction of the best service & approach. For brands or categories where there’s very limited insight or data available, typically with start ups &

the smaller end of SMEs, we can respond much quicker as we win time back in discovery.

The short answer; fully built concepts, delivered quickly through a mix of experience & external perspectives. This process gives you concepts you can put straight into gate or pitch into retailers. It’s not about doing all the homework, its about delivering the creative response. Clearly there’s optionality built in but it critically allows you to make progress at pace, whether this is going into prototyping or R&D workstreams or if you’re presenting it to a customer.

Yes. We run Hothouses across the UK, mainland Europe, the US and the UAE, with the methodology adapted for the local market and provocateur cohort structure adjusted for the cultural and operational context.

This depends entirely on the brief & customer but the lens I’d prefer to use is. If it’s tactical, urgent & you can back up the creative with evidence at a later stage, a hothouse is the best approach. For something that defines investment decisions, team structure or impacts core, a workshop or pipeline approach may be the wiser investment. For large strategic projects, the margin for error is lower, the depth of the discovery program has to be more robust and conviction in a smaller number of big bets is what fundamentally moves the dial on growth. Using an agency to support you on that journey is undoubtedly faster & provides better rigor that doing it alone.

Two reaons. First, we take this entirely off your project list, once we’re briefed and you’ve handed over the data pack, you don’t have to see us for a couple weeks whilst we quietly deliver your project. We often hear from clients that the business has shoehorned in a tactical opportunity and that the team are all too stretched to deliver it (or deliver it well). This is exactly the need a hothouse respond to. Second key difference is our external & cross category perspective. Our innovation team have worked across all channels & categories, often specialising in 2-3 areas of subject matter expertise. However when applying that to a hothouse brief, you’re getting a broad range of experience, bringing in both cross category but also cross sector/ country perspectives on how to inject trends, creativity & commercial success. You simply wouldn’t get this if

you ran something in house. Outside of both those points is just quality of process, you’re paying us to do the work, not to cut corners & to deliver the outcome. When we look at the level of rigor we apply to stim creation, no in house team can compete, they just don’t have the time or bandwidth.

No-one! That’s the beauty of it, it’s not a workshop or multiphase project so you don’t need to free up your team or chase 20 people across 5 functions for a date in 3 months. You just set the brief, wait a couple of weeks & the concepts hit your desk!

Yes we can extend the process to include a more robust discovery & platform building component. This is particularly useful if you want to look at multiple areas or if there are insight gaps you plan to plug. Our preference would always be to involve ourselves in any platform builds or demand space work as it gives us the most context going into the creative process. Clearly this impacts scope, time & cost but it would still be more cost efficient than running a full pipeline program or creative workshop. We find smaller brands including this most often as they need support with the framing and rely on our retail experience to guide them.

This is scope & approach dependent but a hothouse approach is roughly a third of the cost of running a full workshop and a firth of the cost of a full blown pipeline or strategy project. Whilst we offer quite fixed pricing on the entry level approach, we prefer to hear your brief so we can best advise whether the methodology is suitable or not.