The challenge

Alliance Pharmaceuticals set out to drive meaningful marketing innovation in scar care by building a deep, shared understanding of scar consumers across the US and China. The ambition was clear: unlock new growth opportunities and fill the innovation pipeline for the scar care business unit with ideas rooted in real consumer needs.

The solution

We designed an end-to-end innovation journey, blending consumer immersion, creativity and AI-powered acceleration.

1) Building a shared foundation

We began by consolidating around 30 existing reports into a dedicated client portal. This gave all stakeholders access to past learnings and a common knowledge base. Through a structured homework assignment, teams immersed themselves in selected demand spaces. Using our proprietary AI tool, we transformed this input into a sharp, compelling pre-read that aligned everyone before workshops began.

2) Unlocking fresh insight and inspiration

We then ran a 10-day online insight community in both the US and China on scar care, complemented by in-depth interviews with selected participants and interviews with healthcare professionals. To push thinking further, we added a creative crowdsourcing challenge to generate early ideas. Moderator debriefs formed the backbone of the initial storyline, which we deepened using our proprietary AI tools to surface powerful quotes, patterns and tensions.

3) Turning insight into innovation

Insights came to life in three-day, face-to-face workshops in both markets. These combined in-homes or digital consumer connects with overnight concept screening in the community. During the workshops, AI played a central role: helping turn raw consumer ideas into concepts, clustering and refining 60 ideas, and generating visuals for the final 30 concepts in real time.

The impact

The programme gave Alliance Pharmaceuticals more than ideas, it created clarity, confidence and momentum. Teams aligned around a shared, consumer-led understanding of scar care needs across the US and China, breaking down silos between insight, marketing and innovation.

The work resulted in a clear, prioritised innovation roadmap for 2026–2030, grounded in real consumer tensions and opportunities. By combining human insight with AI-enabled acceleration, Alliance Pharmaceuticals now has a scalable way of fuelling its innovation pipeline, faster, more collaboratively and rooted in the consumer reality.