Mogul operates on a three tiered approach: providing clients with innovative products, brand extensions or brand stretches; proactively conceptualising new products that would suit a specific company; and developing ideas into products from third parties.
“The concept of Mogul may seem complicated, yet the service offering is quite simple: provide innovative new products that excite markets, increase profitability and reinforce brand values simultaneously,” says Jupiter Cape Town MD Kevan Aspoas.
“There is vast scope for developing new products once you understand a brand and its strategic intention,” continues Aspoas. “We won’t, however, venture into certain fields – like software or electronics.”
According to Jupiter Cape Town, there is a gap in the traditional advertising offering: agencies specialise in idea generation, yet their clients rely on research and development (R&D) departments to come up with new product ideas. R&D’s core focus is technical innovation, not consumer insight.
Jupiter’s belief is that a new type of company can invent products that consumers really need.
“Mogul has a different way of looking at ideas – they are intellectual-property (IP) and hold value in a court of the law. Ideas are what we sell,” says Kathi Jones, an award-winning commercials producer now heading up the Mogul team.
“We understand brands, and as such, can provide clients with product ideas based on simple insights - that will actually perform in the marketplace,” says Aspoas.
“We make it easy for prospective clients to buy and use our product ideas because of our pricing structure,” continues Jones, “and we’re already developing products from clients across the board - pharmaceutical, confectionery, home ware and entertainment.”
“There is a resounding need for objective creativity at the moment,” says Jones.
“Companies are bombarded with the day-to-day running of a business and have become desensitised to what their target audience is actually looking for. There is little time to accurately view what consumers need and want, and an increasing over-reliance on purely technical data. As such, there is great need for perception engineers like Mogul to overcome these battles,” she says.
“As a consultant IP team, we are in the fortunate position of being able to immerse ourselves in the workings of an industry and to get to the heart of what needs to be done to create the best products for our clients,” says Jones.
“Many people ask if we’re just another advertising agency and to sum it up, Mogul does everything that comes before the advertising,” says Aspoas.
“We place a great deal of emphasis on the ‘brand fit’ of a specific product to a company, and are careful to sculpt and mould a product idea to fit in with the existing brand structures that an organisation has in place,” says Jones.
Mogul is able to provide strategic business plans for the ideas it sells. “This is vital,” says Aspoas. “An idea needs to be bought by the organisation before it can be bought by consumers.”
