What Is an Insight Immersion?

A beverage team walks into a cryotherapy clinic. A pet food brand team climbs a bouldering wall. A design team tours a house printed by a giant robot. None of it has anything to do with their products, and that's exactly the point.

An Insight Immersion takes a team out of the office to learn from passionate experts in parallel worlds, fields that have already solved a version of the problem the team is working on. Then we turn what they see into actionable strategy.

We've designed them since 2008 for Fortune 500 companies like Coca-Cola, Hershey, Intuit and Kellogg's.

It starts with a real question

Every Insight Immersion is built around a question the team actually needs to answer. How do we earn trust in a skeptical category? What does "real" mean to consumers now? Where will our next pipeline idea come from?

That question decides everything else: the city, the stops and the experts we invite.

The stops are parallel worlds

We look for places where the same human need shows up in a different setting. When Coca-Cola's Scientific & Regulatory Affairs team wanted to understand trust and safety, we took them to cryotherapy clinics, cannabis dispensaries and EV innovation labs in Los Angeles. Each one earns consumer confidence in its own way.

When Intuit's Business Model & Monetization team was working on disruptive innovation, they spent time at the 1871 tech incubator, the Chicago Tool Library and a cannabis dispensary.

The categories change. The question stays the same.

The experts are the point

Each stop is hosted by someone who lives and breathes their work: a founder, a scientist, a maker. They aren't there to give a lecture. They show the team how they think, what they've tried and what surprised them. That kind of conversation rarely happens on a vendor call or in a focus group.

Then we turn it into strategy

Inspiration on its own fades fast. So every Insight Immersion ends with working sessions that pull the threads together: what the team saw, what it means for their brand, and what they'll do next. The team leaves with ideas and next steps they can act on, not just good memories.

Why it works

Most teams try to innovate from inside the same room, with the same reports their competitors read. An Insight Immersion changes the inputs. When a team sees a problem solved somewhere unexpected, it starts spotting possibilities it couldn't see before. It also comes home closer, because it discovered those ideas together.

As Andy Scheurer, Director of Pipeline Innovation at Kellogg's, put it: "We unlocked some bold new territories that mainstream consumers would never have volunteered using traditional methods."

Related reading: Innovation Lives Outside Your Comfort Zone

See more client stories on our Case Studies page.

Curious what an Insight Immersion could uncover for your team? Plan your Insight Immersion.