The StarryEyed Innovation Playbook

5 steps to spark on-brand ideas that launch and last.

StarryEyed turns four this fall, but for two decades, our team has helped best-in-class brands create ownable, craveable, newsworthy ideas that drive traffic and transactions.

What we’ve learned: the most successful innovation is not random. It’s a strategic, creative, and intentional process that brings your complete team together to create what’s consumer-centric and operationally feasible.

With these five steps, we believe any team can collaborate to spark big, on-brand ideas that move your business forward and make your brand famous.

ALIGN

Purpose: Ensure everyone is clear about the “why” before diving into the “what.” Confirm clarity and cross-functional commitment before developing new ideas.

Process:

• Bring together your core team (typically marketing, insights, culinary and/or R&D) with a collaborative session to align on your innovation objectives

• Review your brand strategy, consumer audience info/segmentation, current offerings, past promotions, upcoming calendar, and competitor activity

• Define guardrails with what your brand stands for, category antes or gaps and drivers as signature stand-outs, along with current and potential capabilities

• Catalogue your differentiating equities to leverage and confirm essential questions to answer with new insights so you can create with confidence

Outcome: An innovation action plan that is anchored in brand truths, focused on your target audience, and supported by your cross-functional team.

IMMERSE

Purpose: Outline where your brand is and how it can grow with consumer, category, competitive, and cultural trends that outline where you can win.

Process:

• Conduct a landscape assessment by mapping direct competitors, regional players, and aspirational independents for fresh inspiration

• Use archetypes to evaluate your brand and competitors, including positioning, the promises each makes, and how promises are kept through products

• Audit offering lineups to identify gaps, overlaps, and saturated ideas while distinguishing fleeting fads from enduring opportunities

• Apply AI to surface the most relevant cultural trends, unmet needs, and product elements, such as expanding flavors, formats, and experiences

Outcome: A landscape assessment that confirms competitive advantages and white space with a trendscape of relevant, global shifts you can leverage.

INSPIRE

Purpose: Conduct real-world research to answer your essential questions and uncover what consumers truly want, along with what they will crave next.

Process:

• Get to know your consumer with in-the-moment insights and deeper convos via in-home mobile ethnographies, shop-alongs, and/or in-store intercepts

• Combine new consumer learnings with competitive intel, category dynamics, cultural shifts, and brand equities to identify opportunity areas

• Summarize key insights with opportunity spaces or “ways in” that capture emotional territories, consumer truths, and brand connections

• Enrich each space with product platform thought-starters, messaging inspiration, and emotive imagery that convey the desired experiences

Outcome: A set of powerful opportunity spaces that keep the team grounded in real consumer needs to inspire close-in and farther-out ideas.

ILLUMINATE

Purpose: Turn insights and equities into experiential ideas that can scale to become product platforms and window-worthy campaigns.

Process:

• Convene your core and extended teams for an action-packed ideation (or two with round one online and round two in real life to push them even farther)

• Make it interactive and engaging with games (e.g., “The Burger Bachelor” with roses for the best burger ideas) or immersions (e.g., a trip to a hardware store to study tools that can inspire new tortilla chip shapes as “dip carriers”)

• Build narratives with insight-led intros, benefit statements, product descriptions, and line extension ideas to ensure extendability

• Ensure feasibility by challenging teams to work with 90% existing SKUs and equipment, and spark activation thinking with early activation ideas

Outcome: A collection of extendable, craveable, advertisable product platform ideas that are dimensionalized and ready for consumer testing.

ACTIVATE

Purpose: Make the best ideas real as concepts, protocepts and prototypes.

Process:

• Review and distill your ideas with strategic criteria, such as breadth of appeal, uniqueness, competitive insulation, brand fit, and operational viability

• Refine ideas with additional considerations, such as cross-utilization for any new SKUs and activation implications with promotions, partnerships and PR

• Bring to life the best ideas with rapid protocepting so you can try, taste, improve, and validate feasibility with operator and supplier partner input

• Translate the strongest ideas into quant-ready concepts with clear benefits, descriptions, and varieties to validate in consumer testing

Outcome: A collection of consumer-confirmed, market-ready ideas with details to expedite development, fill your pipeline and fuel your marketing calendar.

A bonus idea to put this playbook into action: collaborate with experts who can help you expedite your innovation efforts.

Shameless plug to partner with StarryEyed? You know it. We’d love to help.

Our Innovation Sprints take your team through these steps in a matter of weeks for ideas that’ll fuel your brand for years to come.