What happened to the ‘L’ in Product Lifecycle Management?

Our guest blog from Kieran Forsey, unified brand experience director and co-founder of private brand grocery retail specialist Solutions for Retail Brands (S4RB), looks at the continued importance of Product Lifecycle Management

It’s shocking to think that, within retail, an average of 80 per cent of new product launches fail, while just three per cent of all new consumer goods meet their sales targets.

Product Lifecycle Management – or PLM – was once heralded as the ultimate methodology for retail private brands, helping to create new products that consumers will love. Despite this, there are still too many that are below par by the time they reach the supermarket shelves.

When you draw back the covers on PLM for retail private brands, you soon see there is actually no ‘Lifecycle’ element to it. It is interesting to note that Oracle, one of the leading players in the PLM field, has now shifted its focus and renamed their retail PLM offering as Retail Brand Compliance Management Cloud Service, recognising the shortcomings of overstating expectations.

At the same time, this seems like too easy a route to take and we are still left wondering what happened to the most important element – lifecycle. Without this there will be no data on performance, no insights, no learning and no continued improvement. Is it any wonder that new products fail so often?

Perhaps the main reason so many are shying away from ‘lifecycle’ is that it is incredibly difficult to achieve results. Most retailers gather some ‘voice of the customer’ comments as part of the new product development process through surveys and panels but their track record is not great. All too often, this feedback is self-fulfilling and plagued with statistical shortcomings.

With this in mind, we’ve been working to restore the ‘L’ in PLM. Known as ‘One View’ of brand experience, our solution gives retailers a full picture of how well a product is doing. It collects data from different sources, including test results, assessments, warehouse quality assurance, customer complaints and reviews, during the product’s lifecycle.

When all this information is consolidated, it provides an incredible ‘treasure trove’ of customer opinions, insights and patterns of behaviours. The data is unique to each retailer, highlighting how their own products are performing in the eyes of the customer. In the context of development, it helps them to understand how customers are using products, what they like and don’t like and most importantly, what they want.

This approach means retailers do not have to go out and actively seek data about their products – it already exists. It’s all about consolidating what they already have. Recently, we worked with an international retailer, taking it from ‘no view’ to ‘One View’ in just three months.

If you’re interested in finding out more, drop us a line. We’d love to share our experience and ideas with you.

For more information, take a look at the S4RB blog,The meaning of ‘One View’ for private brand teams.