Envisioning the future of gut health innovation

In 2015, Bayer owned the two top brands in gastrointestinal health. But their NPD’s tended to be around limited to new formats or tweaked benefits—they knew they had to push their innovation further.

Through ethnographies with consumers, we discovered the world of GI issues was fraught with confusion and frustration. Our foresight work with doctors and experts helped us understand why: the medical system addresses the symptoms of GI distress (often with imperfect solutions) without getting at a cause or solution. But new scientific advancements were happening around the gut biome and the mind-gut connection, offering a glimpse of a better world. How much longer would consumers need to suffer?

from managing systems
to treating the cause

We developed a series of innovation platforms, each at the intersection of a consumer pain points and a medical opportunity. And to ensure we addressed both incremental and long-term change, platforms ranged from closer-in (better ways to manage symptoms) to further out (stress and immunity-based treatments) to the holy grail: individually customized gut biome solutions.

The end of GI distress will come one day—and in the meantime, there will be better products available from Bayer to give people more control over their symptoms.

What we did: Consumer Insights, Foresight Analysis, Scenario Planning, Innovation Pipeline