McCarthy Stone

Discover, design and deliver the next generation of Retirement Living developments for aspirational customers

BUSINESS GOAL

McCarthy Stone is an iconic retirement living brand in the UK that creates properties designed for those seeking out new experiences, new friends, new adventures. Our business goal more recently was to create an insights programme that puts homeowners and prospective customers’ needs, desires and experiences at the heart of new innovation – innovations that would guide the design of developments of the future.

THE SOLUTION

Work with the McCarthy Stone Insights and Brand Proposition team to establish an agile consumer insights programme. 360-degree input from McCarthy Stone team on site, design, development and operations teams, marketing, branding teams, as well as involving existing McCarthy Stone customers and those interested in the retirement living offer in the future.

As part of our programme, we build hypotheses to crystallise the business challenge, engage in workshop ideation to develop ideas, before exploring and discovering reactions with customers in a sprint framework. What it means is that in 12 weeks we go from a blank piece of paper to a finalised, market ready design.

THE OUTCOME

The McCarthy Stone team operate more effectively because of this insight programme; more collaboratively to improve time invested, clear decision making, continued development progress all with consumer core needs and commercial ROI in mind. Not only that but the wider team feels more involved and valued as a result. The innovative designs for McCarthy Stone new designs will be rolled out in 24 months’ time.

If you would like to know more about our approach to co creation and new product development, reach out to our UK team at  London@onepicture.com