At Media & Entertainment Strategies, we love to help our clients answer questions and solve problems. In most cases, this involves talking to an external audience (customers, users, viewers, prospects, etc.), but occasionally, we turn our attention to the client organization itself. Our innovative and results-driven approach to brainstorming and ideation taps into the client’s most valuable resource – its people – and helps them unleash evolutionary and revolutionary ideas for their business.
M&ES Ideate sessions help clients to make creative leaps in brand extension, product development, franchise evolution, marketing strategy and communications. It is creative, fun and effective, yielding dozens of potential innovations.
These sessions typically consist of between eight and 12 participants (ideally representing multiple functions within an organization) and follow an optimized format, outlined below.
- “Goal Definition” – Initial statement of the objectives of the session
- In most cases, participants will have been briefed about these in advance
- “Rules of Engagement”
- Do not judge
- Verbal and non-verbal criticisms are not allowed
- “And,” not “But”
- Suspend title, rank and ownership
- Be creative and imaginative
- Wild and wacky ideas are encouraged
- Abandon your internal editors: no filters
- No “We would never,” or “We could never”
- Be prolific
- Quantity leads to breakthroughs
- Be present
- Be here, and nowhere else
- Do not judge
- “Input” (optional, but recommended)
- Several stimuli options
- Trend hunting
- Market / cultural data
- Competitive review
- Consumer / stakeholder insights
- Ideation occurs during this exercise
- Several stimuli options
- “Playback”
- All ideas shared by participants
- “Development”
- Session divided into small teams
- Each team selects their two or three favorite ideas, and works to develop them further using a question-oriented template
- Each team presents their developed ideas to the rest of the group, encouraging further brainstorming and enhancement
- “After-the-Fact”
- All participants email M&ES within 48 hours of the session ending, with any ideas, thoughts, etc., that occurred to them after the session concluded
These sessions can be conducted at a corporate location, or at a nearby facility, whichever is more convenient and likely to yield the greatest participant focus.