For several decades Etex Group has been a leader in different categories within the segment of the development of materials and solutions for the construction and remodeling of homes. In Peru one of its brands, Eternit, is a symbol of trust and a product that has been transferred from generation to generation.

However in recent years, the entry of various low-cost Asian materials; In addition to greater penetration and access to the retail sale of construction materials, it has allowed a slightly more sophisticated behavior of the end consumer, who begins to look for innovative, functional, durable alternatives at an affordable cost.

Etex Group asked us to help them generate different concepts for the pipeline of their 2020 projects. This concepts need to be only on: floors and exterior ceilings floors.

They did not seek to work prototypes because many times, being an industrial organization with tangible products and complex technical specifications, this phase should be carried out by their team of specialist engineers but with the input of the concepts that we can reach.

What they needed from us was for us to help with de discovery of the pains and needs of users in popular areas of Lima, and with that information, work on the concepts in a hands on workshop with key Etex staff from Perú, Colombia, and Chile.

The project consisted of being able to find the pains and opportunities when we visited on site a set of users with specific profiles. Etex Executives had a previous categorization that we need to took on our process, this was inspired in market research of the local consultancy firm Arellano Marketing:

With this as a prerequisite, we begin planning the field investigation.

The first point was to narrow a bit more the delivered profiles. So we defined that we were going to work with the delivered profile segmentation and additionally:

We also define what topics we would like to touch on in the interview, to later brainstorm questions to guide the interview in depth. Our number was 18 people, 10 end users, 5 dealers (channel partners) and 3 experts (engineers of Etex). 

We defined that we would provide a supermarket voucher (S/. 100.00) for those who give us time to interview them at their homes, and with this we advertised on Facebook; our segmentarion was by age (28 to 50 years), preferences on construction and remodeling houses, as well as the districts that we mentioned before.

We work on a rolling basis, As we had leads that we validated and confirmed the visit, we scheduled in-depth interviews. Fue muy enriquecedor conocer algunos insights como:

- The importance of the family as the fundamental nucleus of society.

- The great effort to be able to build the dream of your own house, brick by brick

- In popular districts there is interior decoration culture with a peculiar style

- The importance of large space as a luxury in popular districts

- The Acceleration of the materials purchase on retail stores

- The huge informal market for bricklayers and foremen

After each interview we tried to download the information in Miro from home. The reason of that was a time saving action. Because in Lima, the distances and the traffic jam didn't allowed us to come back to the office before 6 pm.

Therefore we worked the information download remotely, because if one member of the team took an interview in the afternoon (most of the users were available at that time), it was very difficult for us to return to share the information to the office, so we went straight home and from there we connected to be able to discuss and leave the information available for others to review the next day.

After the interviews, what we worked on was User Personas for each of the four profiles that we identified. Long story short, the output, was this:

Also we organized the insights in categories and sub-categories:

After this field research and insights discovery, we scheduled the workshop with the Etex Group executives. It was 2 full days, about 20 people participated, which we divided into 4 groups of 5 people. Each group was responsible for a profile.

We ran the workshop in a hotel, and in addition to some strategic planning issues shared by general director of Etex, We worked on this techniques:

Journey Maps 

¿How Might we?

Crazy 8's

Brainstorming Session

Group to Group Feedback

Prioritization Criteria

Dot Voting

Sketching Session

Conceptual Development

The result of the two days workshop was approximately 60 ideas in total at the four profiles. Subsequently, what we did was prioritize with criteria previously defined by the general management and the marketing manager of Etex Group.
This action limited to a panel of just 35 ideas:

After qualitatively prioritizing, the prioritization was refined using the Mash Up technique, to see the ideas that could be complementary.

And finally the Dot Voting technique. They yielded 16 ideas to develop concepts using the Sketching technique. Likewise, each of these ideas needed an idea profile, in a simple format to work with.

Some of the sketches can be viewed here:

I consider that my participation in this project has been relevant, beginning by understanding the requirement and being able to define the strategy to face the project.

The planning and execution of the research, I was able to execute 7 of the 10 interviews with end users, as well as a couple of interviews with dealers and Etex engineers.
In the project I had the privilege of working with Brenda Chacaltana and Diego Choque from the Lapsus Innovation team.

After that, the organization of the information in Miro and in person, synthesizing, generating and categorizing insights to have enough evidence about the profiles to work in the ideation workhop.

Definitely, lead the workshop with people of different nationalities was a great experience.

A challenge that was interesting to address was, that knowing from the beginning, that we were not going to prototype, something key to achieve was to inspire creativity in each of the teams but without convey my bias , so the proposals would be genuinely and belong to the participants and not the facilitator.

I believe that Etex was quite satisfied with the outcome, and that is very positive for generating credibility to encourage innovation in traditional companies.