The Delightful Quest for Optimal

Maximizing consumer delight has always been a top priority for any product manufacturer, resulting in a critical need for ongoing innovation married with endless product modifications. Yet, while a priority, it continues to be increasingly difficult to steal share or truly differentiate oneself versus competition within an existing and/or niche category. Unfortunately, reactive versus proactive research has become more of the product testing norm, with endless rounds of formula `tweaking' versus the prescriptive pursuit of a farther out, more differentiated optimal product.

In today's ever changing marketplace, the desire to differentiate, maximize consumer acceptance, and ultimately shine is easier said than done. R&D, Marketing, Insights, Sales and Innovation teams are charged with multiple objectives and are constantly faced with a deluge of difficult and quite often fragmented questions from their management.

The reality is we now live in an age where we do not have the luxury of tackling these objectives in isolation. The goal to maximize product acceptance is often balanced with vying objectives, many of which can lie in direct opposition to each other. For example, while Marketing and product developers are being asked to deliver differentiated products, they may simultaneously be asked to identify opportunities to save costs, improve margins, or possibly achieve sustainability/BFY initiatives. When we factor in the influences of a global marketplace, global segments, and a desire for global harmonization, the task becomes even more complex. And, even more expensive.

Faced with expedited timelines and tightened budgets, many teams feel compelled to attack these varied objectives with smaller scaled product tests that answer individual questions - but these often fail to address the bigger picture. Too often the research fails to provide long-term strategic insights that can drive their business forward.

What happens as a result is that teams get caught in the dreaded `test and tweak' trap: in this situation, new or modified formulations are created that hopefully align with one or more of the objectives (e.g., improved formulations, cost savings, harmonized formulas), they are evaluated by consumers and if action standards are not met, additional rounds of modifications and consumer testing are required.

And while these individual tests may meet very specific objectives, they lack synergies to address some of the organization's most critical goals (e.g., identifying the explicit drivers of acceptance along with potential candidates for cost savings). This cycle can have tremendous implications for an organization's time, money, and resources - with perhaps little to show to senior management. Ultimately, much of the forward progress made can feel incremental rather than breakthrough.

So, if iterative tweaking is not the solution, how can an organization successfully and efficiently identify how to be more differentiated and therefore competitive in the marketplace - whether that is through quality improvements, cost savings, harmonized formulas or all of the above?

Underlying all these varied questions and objectives is the need for teams to obtain foundational and strategic knowledge of the products in a category(s). It is not merely about product performance at later stages of the product development lifecycle - it's about using products themselves as the foundation for understanding how to move innovation and renovation strategies forward and closer to opportunity.

Teams must understand the underlying drivers of categorical liking in order to identify relevant product improvement opportunities, and also to identify meaningful gaps in the sensory space that can start them on the their journey for identifying new product ideas.

We strongly believe that this journey into opportunity must always begin with a foundational understanding of the products (or more generally, sensory profiles) that comprise a given category to uncover what consumers like and don't like, as well as to identify potential space indicative of future opportunity. Smaller scale `test & tweak' product tests should be replaced with more strategic product research though which one obtains consumer reactions to a variety of products in a given category (or perhaps multiple related categories).

Read our full paper on this topic by clicking here.