Exploring existing consumer behavior
Exploring consumer behavior through experimentation
The sourcing R&D team of one of our clients came to us with a problem… you see, they had this honestly delicious by-product that came out of a core production process across a major chunk of the business, and they thought it had potential!
Problem was: no one else within the organization did.
The team kept hitting their head against the brick walls of ingrained historical thinking throughout the business that dismissed this by-product as “never going to be big enough to care”.
Their intuition disagreed, but perhaps they were wrong? There were other products in market using the by-product, and they were tiny… Of course they were, those products were all designed and marketed to be super niche.
Was their under-performance a result of that niche approach, or a sign that this by-product was a nothing-burger of an opportunity?
The by-product itself was delicious, all-natural, had an incredible sustainability story, plus you could do a lot of very different and delicious things with it… so many that no one knew where to even start.
They asked us to help them find out. Could we take a look and see if we could uncover the glimmer of a mass market potential they could take to the higher-ups to gain organizational buy-in and internal development focus?
We were keen to dig in and find some unique value.
Our Challenge?
Discover a highly-desirable mass market potential product based off this delicious & flexible by-product.
Our approach
First, we got up to speed
What was the by-product really? What did it taste like? What were the formats it could deliver?
What were the all existing competitive products? Why were they still tiny?
What did consumers think? Well, we talked to a bunch to learn how they reacted to the by-product & its various attributes.
Then we got designing
Armed with everything we had learned, plus broader trends in the category, we got to work.
We rapidly designed a few product propositions that represented key opportunity areas we had observed.
And, most importantly, we iteratively experimented to learn if any of them had some killer mass-market potential.
Key outcome
Definite potential here! One of our concepts showed serious promise in the all-important better-for-you space.
Here’s the thing with unique ingredients stories in the CPG innovation game: it’s so natural to make the ingredient the focus of the value you’re selling, instead of uncovering the truly valuable proposition the unique ingredient enables.
We found that to absolutely be the case here.
Why were the existing products that used this relatively unknown but super powerful ingredient languishing in obscurity? Because they were focused purely on selling the ingredient as the benefit.
Why did our concepts show great mass-market potential with real consumers making real purchase attempts in the real digital environment? Because we focused on delivering an actual value they cared about.
Through our iterative testing, we treated the unique by-product ingredient as an enabler of value.
We experimented across multiple potential values, consumers, formats, occasions, brands and messages, all with the goal to zero in on a value proposition consumers responded to (possible white-space) that the by-product was powerfully able to deliver on.
And through our creativity yet systematic experimental approach we were able to crack a proposition that showed real promise in a space (better-for-you) and a format that would provide a useful expansion opportunity for the business.
And ultimately enabling the business to unlock new growth through something that they typically see as garbage.
The team presented to their leadership, and are now in discussions for how to make it a priority.