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REVOLUTIONISE YOUR RESEARCH THROUGH DATA SCIENCE
Using AI to unlock the power of Social data we understand and predict consumer
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WE’VE RAISED $18.5M!
We’re thrilled to share that Black Swan Data have recently closed a $18.5M
growth fundraising round which adds Oxx Capital to our existing investors:
Albion VC, Blackstone, Mitsui and Lloyds. It’s an incredibly proud moment for us
both, and the Black Swan team.
It seems like only yesterday that we were shooting the breeze over a beer in
Toronto when we first came up with the idea of connecting disparate social data
sources to better predict consumer behaviour.
It took us a few years to narrow our focus and find our product/market fit, but
we can now safely say that our vision has come to fruition and our technology is
helping pioneering brands to anticipate what’s next and innovate more
effectively. In that time, we’ve gone from strength to strength—and we can’t
wait to see what the future holds in store.
Our investors
We’re incredibly excited to partner with new investors Oxx for this next chapter
and are hugely grateful for the continued support our existing investors have
delivered.
Oxx is renowned for its B2B SasS expertise, having invested in—and
advised—multiple EU- and Israeli-based tech companies. They bring experience in
helping high-growth tech companies like us, expand into the US market, making
them ideal partners as we seek to expand our focus in this region.
We’re delighted to welcome Philip Edmondson-Jones, Principal at Oxx, to the
board and continue our relationship with Ed Lascelles, Partner at AlbionVC. Phil
shares our vision for the future of Black Swan Data: “The business has made
incredible progress over the last few years, and we are delighted to be backing
Steve, Hugo and the rest of their excellent team to extend Trendscope’s
functionality and expand the business even further into the US market”.
Meanwhile, Ed’s continuous positivity and infectious enthusiasm have played a
huge part in getting us to where we are—and will undoubtedly continue to help us
moving forward. “We are delighted to continue supporting Black Swan in this
round. It has been wonderful to see the team realise their vision of
revolutionising insights through data, and we have been impressed at the rapid
growth of the flagship product Trendscope over recent years. We are excited to
see the further development of the market that this round of finance will
enable,” said Ed.
Our mission
Here at Black Swan Data, we’re changing how companies innovate. Our technology
analyses and connects the topics discussed by millions of consumers online to
identify today’s top trends and spot tomorrow’s rising stars.
We help a range of companies, from PepsiCo (one of the world’s leading CPGs) to
Cosnova (a challenger taking on the titans in beauty and cosmetics), to innovate
smarter, faster and more accurately than before. We’re honoured to count several
global heavyweights, including Johnson & Johnson, Kraft Heinz, Harley Davidson,
Henkel and P&G, among our growing customer base.
Trendscope—our flagship product—enables companies to deliver reliably relevant
innovation by predicting trends and powering decision making, with an 89%
accuracy. It brings clarity on what consumers are thinking, how they’re behaving
and what’s around the corner. This scientific foresight capability is crucial in
helping brands to navigate increasingly uncertain times and understand what will
represent value for consumers in the months ahead. Trendscope also democratises
consumer intelligence beyond the market research department, enabling companies
to reinvent their innovation processes and create agile new ways of working that
save them time and cost.
As Stephan Gans, SVP, Chief Consumer Insights and Analytics Officer at PepsiCo,
explains:
“At PepsiCo, Trendscope has been instrumental in the development of new products
and staying ahead of mainstream consumer preferences by monitoring data from
Twitter, Reddit, and other online sources. During the pandemic, for example, we
saw an increase in conversations and posts about seltzer makers and new flavours
in lieu of consumers being able to consume their favourite beverages out of the
home. This insight helped PepsiCo prioritise and fast-track the development of
new products like Bubly Drops to take advantage of this growing territory.
Trendscope better enables us to see our categories through the eyes of the
consumer and to isolate the emerging trends that will matter tomorrow, versus
those that will quickly fade away.”
Our plans for the future
Going forward, we plan on using our latest investment round to:
* Enhance our prediction accuracy (89%) and prediction time period, delivering
against our mission to de-risk innovation and inspire growth.
* Expand our data sources/partnerships, ensuring increased coverage and market
representation, and investing in R&D to develop new use cases for prediction.
* Roll-out a major upgrade to Trendscope , our most ambitious product release
to date. The all new version of Trendscope features a more intuitive UX,
enabling users to get their insight and innovation jobs to be done, done!
* Scale our US operations, helping more US-based customers to reinvent their
innovation processes and beat the competition.
* Further support the White Swan charity, which uses our technology for free to
help patients with rare diseases find a diagnosis.
Our fantastic team
Last but not certainly not least, we’d like to thank all of our swans—both past
and present—whose tireless work and pioneering spirit has helped make Black Swan
Data what it is today. We are truly standing on the shoulders of giants and
couldn’t have done it without you. We count ourselves incredibly privileged to
have worked alongside all of you, and we can’t wait for what the future has in
store.
Steve King & Hugo Amos
* READ MORE
Attitudes towards drinks are changing. Especially among health conscious and
younger consumers. They want beverages that do more than refresh, hydrate and
taste good. They are talking about cognitive benefits that help them perform
at their best and deliver calming effects. So, how do you innovate in this
growing opportunity space today? And how will it evolve tomorrow?
* READ MORE
Many large CPG firms are struggling to innovate fast enough, and this is
leading some to experiment with different business models and different ways
to get things through their large systems. The cry of ‘be Agile!’ can be
heard in many corporate offices, and with this push to be more agile it could
be easy to think that stage gate processes should be abolished altogether.
However, before your team goes rushing to burn down the halls of the stage
gate process, let’s take a step back and discuss why it was set up in the
first place – and following that – how you can make it faster, leaner, and
more predictive – without entirely abandoning the positive things a stage
gate process provides.
Why have a stage gate process in the first place?
The goal of any stage gate process is to increase the ROI (Return on
Investment) from the company’s spend on Innovation and New Product
Development.
How do you achieve higher ROI? In my role at PepsiCo where I helped define
and standardise the research steps within the stage gate process, there was a
function called ‘Commercialisation’. Led by Garry Clancy, one of the primary
responsibilities of this function was to manage and run the stage gate
process – of which research is just one input. Garry had a simple way to
explain how we increase innovation ROI:
“DO THE RIGHT PROJECTS, AND DO THE PROJECTS RIGHT”
GARRY CLANCY, SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT, GLOBAL INNOVATION & COMMERCIALISATION,
PEPSICO
So what does that practically mean, and why is it important? If you are a
small company and you only launch one or two innovations a year, then you
don’t really need a stage gate process. Setting up an agile team and having
regular check-ins with stakeholders will enable you to have the right level
of input to avoid risks and optimise your ideas. You can still use the
research tools I will describe below to improve your ROI, but you won’t need
a stage gate process with the same level of formality and oversight as a
larger organisation.
However, if your company is launching multiple innovations each year –
potentially across different divisions or regions, then it becomes more
important to have a standardised system for evaluating innovation and
comparing innovations against each other. Decisions need to be made to
prioritise resources and ensure that the right ideas are being worked on
(those with the highest chance of a strong ROI), and that those ideas are as
good as they can be (fully optimised). And this is exactly what the stage
gate process is designed to do.
Are all innovations equal?
No! Not all innovations are equal in that they don’t all require the same
amount of Investment to create and launch. Nor do they all carry the same
potential in revenue. So the potential ROI is very different from one
innovation to the next. So too then the flow through the stage gate process
must be different for different types of innovation.
There are many different ways to classify innovation types, and each really
depends on the context of your company. The basic axis to operate on is
Risk/Reward. What is ‘high’ risk/reward innovation in one company might be
considered ‘medium’ or ‘low’ in another. But to help move the conversation
forward, here is a simple segmentation of innovation types. Each of the
following types of innovation would have different requirements as part of
the Stage Gate Process.
Risk/Reward Levels
“High”
* Breakthrough innovation – requiring large CAPEX spend (i.e. a new product
form), or entry into a new market, or a major communicated
reformulation/restage of a large existing product
“Medium”
* New sub-brand, a medium spend in Promotion and/or CAPEX, or a restage of
an existing medium sized product/brand
“Low”
* A flavour or variant line extension with minimal CAPEX or new ad spend
The Stages and Gates
For the purposes of the rest of this article, let’s assume that you are a
large CPG firm that produces products that are sold on shelves in
Supermarkets. The number of gates and the type of decisions made at each are
the same regardless of whether your innovation is High, Medium, or Low.
What changes is the level of rigour that is needed to pass each of the gates,
with higher risk/reward innovations needing more rigour & research, and
innovations that are lower requiring less rigour/research.
Gate 0 – Strategy
Gate 0 isn’t really a gate, but it’s an important part of the process. Gate
0 is all about Strategy, and the research tools that help you discover white
spaces – find areas of potential competitive advantage, understand the needs
and wants of your potential customers and ultimately help your company decide
‘Where to Play?’ to drive the most growth.
Aligning the organisation to the output of the research and strategic
thinking work done in Gate 0 will pay many dividends in the rest of the
process – and is the foundation of the ‘Do the Right Projects’ part of the
equation. In fact – high failure rates in subsequent gates is often a
symptom of not spending enough time/resources on getting Gate 0 right.
The goal then of Gate 0 is to understand the current and future category
trends in as much detail as possible – and then to take that understanding
and align it to your company’s capabilities and business strategy. The
research should help you answer questions like: What product types are
consumers gravitating towards? What claims/product attributes are
resonating? What new brands are gaining traction and why? What consumer
behaviour is driving the change? What are the important trends not just now,
but in the future? What part of the market should I target? There are many
different types of research methods, tools and companies that provide for
these questions. Four common types:
* Segmentations
* Usage & Attitude Studies
* Category Trend Studies
* Ethnographies/Online Communities/Focus Groups
Each of these types of studies can be conducted in both traditional and
non-traditional (next generation) ways and there are many companies that
offer the above, from our own Black Swan Data to the big full-service
providers like Kantar and Ipsos.
Things to watch out for:
* Does the research provide a longitudinal view, or is it just a snapshot in
time?
* Does the research provide a prediction of the future?
* Does the research capture all of the trends in a category, and help you
find those ‘unknown unknowns’?
* Does the research help you prioritise and make decisions, or does it just
give you a list of things for further investigation?
* Does the research give you enough practical detail to action immediately,
or are the findings too high level/generic?
As a final note on Gate 0 – although all of the gates require stakeholder
alignment and buy-in, it is MOST important in Gate 0. If the organisation
doesn’t buy into the strategy or the reasoning and research behind that
strategy, getting ideas through the rest of the gates will be much MUCH
harder. So be sure to spend the time here on internal buy in.
Think of it like a product launch to consumers – and treat it such inside
your organisation. Market the hell out of it. Get T-shirts, mugs, posters,
videos created, whatever it is that will help embed the ideas and get
everyone talking in the same language about the segments in the market and
which ones the company is deciding to go after.
Gate 1 – Idea
Stage 1 (which ends in Gate 1), is all about Ideation. Let’s start off by
defining what an idea is, and how it differs from a concept. An idea should
have just enough information in it to get the main consumer relevant points
of the new product across – without tying yourself down to too many
executional elements. Concepts, which come later on in the process, build on
these ideas and add in more executional detail like a Pack Image, variant
line up, and even a price point/pack size/weight. Different testing systems
(more on this below) have different standards, but in general these are the
elements of an idea vs a concept
While it is true that ideas can come from anywhere, and they should certainly
be welcomed and captured, ideally, they would start from what you learned and
aligned on from Gate 0 – i.e. ideas that fit the consumer needs identified in
the market whitespace you chose from Gate 0.
In the Idea phase your company should be generating 10’s to 100’s of ideas –
and then finding ways to screen through them as quickly and objectively as
you can – with the goal of using consumer feedback to help you provide an
early read on in-market viability. Try not to screen out too many ideas at
this stage that you don’t currently have an R&D capability for – if it fits
the needs identified in Gate 0, there are many ways to acquire the capability
needed to produce the product.
As you are generating these ideas and preparing them to get consumer
feedback, it’s often unavoidable to have extra ideas thrown in that are not
on strategy – common sources are executive ideas (HiPPO – Highest Paid
Person’s Opinion), R&D capabilities searching for a home and a use case, or
things that competitors are doing that aren’t in the market whitespace you
have already identified.
Do your best not to include these – as even if they come up with strong
results, they could lead you off strategy which has other implications. If
you can’t avoid it – try to remind the stakeholder of the agreements you made
in Gate 0 and get them to self-identify that their idea might not be on
strategy.
When it comes to getting consumer feedback to help you objectively screen and
prioritise ideas, there are many ways to do it including:
1) use a survey to get quantitative analysis
2) run a focus group and assess them qualitatively
3) use a big data tool that uses secondary data like we do at Black Swan Data
Options 1 and 2 require showing a consumer a stimulus, and prompting for
feedback to that stimulus – in option 1 in the form of a survey, in option 2
in the form of a live conversation. For a more in-depth review of some of
the challenges of these primary research based method, see my previous
article here: Is it the beginning of the end of Primary Research?
If you move forward with either option 1 or 2, a few things to ensure you
keep in mind. Primarily, that the key concept behind using surveys or qual to
screen ideas is benchmarking. No matter what the response is – positive or
negative, the only way to know if that response is important or significant
is to do three things:
1) Compare the results you have for that idea vs the results you have from
other ideas
2) Ensure all of the variables EXCEPT the idea stimulus have remained the
same across studies – I.e. the sample composition, the questions asked, the
question order, the collection methodology (online, offline, mobile etc), the
order the ideas are shown in, even the format of the stimulus (images
included or not, where text is placed, etc)
3) Ensure you have enough ideas to compare against (in a test vs a database)
and that those ideas represent a spread of good, bad, and average ideas that
are relevant for the category. Usually you are looking for 30+ ideas to bench
against – the more the better.
If you go with a more traditional technique like option 1 or 2, here are some
companies to look at. They generally vary along 3 axis:
* The size and comprehensiveness of their benchmark database
* The speed / cost of the study
* Whether you set up the study yourself and analyse it (DIY), or have
someone else do it for you.
The 3rd option involves using data that already exists to validate that your
idea has consumer potential – enabling you to replace what traditionally
could only have been done by getting new primary research data via a survey
or focus group. This is a new and exciting area of innovation in the market
research space, and one that we at Black Swan Data have been leading the
charge in for the past few years.
We track online conversation about hundreds of thousands of trends, organised
into category datasets. Our tool, TRENDSCOPE, allows clients to build ideas
based on what consumers are naturally talking about – both about a specific
product like Matcha Tea or Alcoholic Seltzers, but importantly also about
other connected trends, like which benefits or ingredients consumers are
talking about together with a specific product. This allows our clients to
build new ideas quickly and confidently without having to run an expensive or
time-consuming survey – using the volume and predicted volume of consumer
conversation to prioritise the ideas with the best chance of future success.
Whichever option you choose, at the end of Gate 1 – the goal is to have found
ideas that meet a minimum threshold of consumer appeal, and ideally also a
decent amount of uniqueness (although this may be less important for some
innovations).
Alongside the validation from consumers, internally you are likely to have
estimates about the amount of investment/CAPEX it would take to actually
produce the new product described in the idea and the combination of those
two things – essentially value vs. effort. The ideas that pass this gate
form your ‘hopper’ of ideas that are ready to progress to the next stage
should be in a priority order based on the value vs. effort, and also a
strategic assessment of fit to strategy.
Gate 2 – Concept
Work done in this stage is all about refining and building out the full
concept. In this phase goals – and how much money you spend on researching
these goals vs making a judgement call – should depend on the level of
Risk/Reward of the Innovation (High/Med/Low as described above).
Here are some typical goals:
⁃ Choose and optimise the ideal pack design
⁃ Choose an ideal new product name
⁃ Choose the most relevant expression of the key benefit
⁃ Choose the ideal product variant/flavour line up
⁃ Choose and optimise the price point
⁃ Validate the overall concept
⁃ Forecast the potential revenue from the overall concept
All of the points here are conceptual – no actual product development has
begun yet, and there are qualitative and quantitative ways to achieve most of
the goals above. Many companies use a combination of quant/qual methods
-starting with qual to get some initial feedback on things like the benefit
expression or the pack design, and then moving to quant to choose and
validate the decision.
For the quant part, nearly all of your options will be survey based.
Traditional methodologies include: monadic concept testing, conjoint,
TURF/SURF analysis. Newer methods include: Competitive Markets (similar to
chip game studies), Eye-tracking for Pack Design tests, or the genetic
algorithm based method of Affinova (now part of Nielsen/BASES).
Nearly all full service market research firms will offer all or most of the
services and methodologies above, but here it starts to pay to work with more
specialist vendors. That is because as we said in Gate 1 – if you are using a
survey based method to validate ideas – what really matters is WHAT you are
validating them against, I.e. what are the benchmarks the company has to
compare your ideas or new concepts against. Some of the newer methods like
competitive markets claim that they don’t need databases of previous studies
and can rely on the comparison in a single study – but even those require
that the concepts you put into that single study are all relevant for the
category and represent a good spread of ideas.
In addition, many of the solutions above are available in a fully customised
form from the vendor, but also now many are offering standardised versions on
DIY platforms like Zappi or on their own similar platform. Some vendors to
check out for this phase:
* The traditional heavyweights – BASES (Nielsen IQ), Ipsos
* Competitive Markets – System 1, Veylinx, Hotspex
* Pack Testing – PRS, EyeSee, Dragonfly.ai
* DIY Platform – Zappi
Black Swan’s TRENDSCOPE can also help pair with many of these services by
helping you screen down options like ideal flavours, or benefits before going
into costly validation tests with the above vendors. In tests we’ve done
with some of our clients we’ve seen significant uplifts in concept scores by
optimising elements of their concept using our TPV (Trend Prediction Value)
and Associations metric to find emerging elements with higher relevance and
uniqueness. So while the final validation is still done by one of the vendors
listed above, you can both get better scores and reduce the number of
concepts you have to test if you use a refinement/optimisation tool like
Black Swan to help you better prepare. See case study here for more: How
Trendscope generated $64m ROI through Concept Optimisation.
At the end of Gate 2, the goal is to have consumer validation of your full
concept proposition – i.e. a specific product, under a specific brand, with a
specific benefit and reason to believe, with a chosen price point, flavour
line up, and pack design. Essentially, everything you would see if you were
to walk up to that new product on a shelf in a retail store. Passing the
gate means you have achieved a sufficient score against the benchmarks from
the concept test on things like Purchase Intent, Value, and Uniqueness and
also your internal finance and R&D teams will have started doing some
modelling on CAPEX investment needed to create and launch the new product.
The combination of those two things: sufficient consumer validation, and
sufficient internal financial modelling/payback is what you need to pass Gate
2.
One last note on Gate 2, it can be tempting for marketers to ‘stack the deck’
in a concept in order to pass this stage – making claims in the concept that
will be hard for the product to live up to in reality. Doing so will
certainly improve your concept score – but remember the stage gate process
isn’t always linear. If in the next phase the R&D team isn’t able to create a
product that lives up to the overly inflated expectations set by the concept,
then you’ll need to revise the concept, re-test and come back to pass Gate 2
again, losing both time and money as you rework the concept. Not to mention
pissing off your colleagues in R&D…
Gate 3 – Concept/Product Fit
The whole goal of this phase is to achieve concept/product fit and will be
heavily led by the R&D team. No product is objectively good or bad
independent of an expectation. Our human brains place an expectation on
everything we see before we experience it – and how good that experience is
will depend on whether it met, exceeded, or failed our expectations.
Even in a blind product test there are expectations consumers will have
before they trial the product – we just don’t know what they are. So the goal
here is to prime consumers with the appropriate context as they would get
when they bought the product in-store (i.e. the concept you tested in Gate
2), and then give them the product to experience and see if it meets their
expectations.
Along the way the R&D, Insights, and Marketing teams may conduct any number
of studies – both qualitative and quantitative to help them optimise aspects
of the product. If it’s a food product there may be many ways to achieve the
desired texture, or thickness, or flavour profile/intensity and many of the
same techniques and vendors described in Gate 2 also can be used here – with
the addition of having consumers actually try the product.
At the end of Gate 3 is the most important decision of the whole process –
the ‘Go/No Go’ decision that is made before any significant CAPEX is spent.
Here again we look at the Risk/Reward profile of the innovation, and the
hurdles each has to go through at Gate 3 will be different.
If it is low CAPEX – for example a limited edition flavour variant – very
little will be needed in terms of validation. However, if it will require
$50-$100M in CAPEX to build a new factory and manufacturing process to create
the new product, then you will likely need not only a full concept/product
test that passes all the benchmarks with flying colours – but also a forecast
of Yr 1 and Yr 2 revenue.
The forecast can be received from an STM (Simulated Test Market) from
companies like BASES/Nielsen IQ where they combine the consumer input from a
concept/product test with the marketing/launch plan you give them (i.e. how
much distribution will be achieved, how much promotion and advertising spend
there will be, etc) to predict Y1 and Y2 sales for the new product launch.
These tests are expensive so only worth doing on your highest risk/reward
innovations – but the test is far less expensive than wasting $100M on a new
factory that goes under-utilised.
My personal point of view on STM’s is they are useful for high risk/high
CAPEX decisions, but they are generally too expensive and slow – and most are
optimised for a predominately offline/bricks & mortar world. As more and
more shopping goes online, these methodologies will struggle to retain their
accuracy – and new methodologies will arise that are more predictive,
cheaper, and faster. I talk about one potential method here: Is it the
beginning of the end of Primary Research?
Gate 4 – Launch
At this point you have the green light to go ahead, and the Supply Chain
function are busy building the factory and equipment needed to produce the
new product. The focus here now shifts to launch preparation with the
Marketing and Insights team focusing on distribution, promotion and
communication plans.
Comm’s is a critical component of every new launch – and will play a huge
role in setting consumer expectations for your new product. Working in
partnership with your advertising agency, you’ll likely go through a process
of qualitative research -> quantitative research that in many ways is similar
to the process in Gates 1 and 2 – with the difference being that here you are
testing an advertising idea vs the overall product concept.
Given the similarities with Gate 1 and 2, the methodologies you can use are
also similar. One key consideration here is to incorporate a better
understanding of cultural trends beyond just your category. To help you
ideate and screen ad ideas you can use companies like Sparks & Honey,
Discover.ai, or Black Swan Data! When you get to creating a script or
animatic of your ad idea, similar challenges exist as in Gate 2 – i.e. if you
want to validate that your advertising concept is good, you need to have a
way of benchmarking that idea vs other ideas using the same method. Again,
here you can choose between fully custom tests from most full service
research providers or you can employ standardised solutions from companies
like Zappi.
Either way, if you are setting up your research standards for a stage gate
process for the first time – try and settle on one methodology. It will make
the comparison across innovations much easier, and you’ll only have to
educate your organisation once on why they should believe the results.
At the end of Gate 4 is the final launch decision. By this point you should
have a killer advertising campaign, strong retailer rollout plans, and R&D
should have tested the final product off the full assembly line to ensure it
tastes as good as the testing samples that were used in the Go/No Go decision
at Gate 3.
Gate 5???
Hooray! The innovation is out in the world and flying off the shelves. Time
to move onto the next project, right? Not exactly. While the formal stage
gate process is over at this point, I’d encourage companies to think about
adding a ‘Gate 5’. That Gate isn’t a gate in the traditional sense. It’s not
a go/no go decision, but rather a formalised point of reflection conducted 12
months after launch to review performance. Did you achieve the distribution
you expected? Did the marketing perform as well as projected? Have sales
hit forecast? The goal here is to understand what has happened, and use these
learnings to improve future innovations (as well as input into the Year 2+
strategy of the innovation that was launched).
All of the Gates I’ve described above may seem like a lot – but remember how
much rigour you apply at each stage should vary by Risk/Reward. For the
highest Risk Reward Innovations you may do several studies at all of the
gates. For the lowest – you might only do two studies for the entire process
– one to check the concept, and one to check concept/product fit. The process
can be as fast or slow as needed – but the important thing is it gives you a
common framework in your organisation to make objective data-backed
decisions.
Dave Soderberg is Black Swan Data’s Chief Data Officer. Prior to working at
Black Swan, Dave spent over a dozen years working in agency and client-side
market research roles for PepsiCo, Spectrum Health and BASES. To talk to Dave
or a member of the team please contact us at hello@blackswan.com.
November 2021
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We’ll be in touch soon. Until then, here’s some reading to whet your appetite.
Turn on the news, read a newspaper, browse Twitter or any other news source, and
you’ll find an article or a story about the growing Cost-of-Living Crisis.
Everybody’s talking about it – particularly consumers.They are beginning to feel
the pinch and are expressing their concerns at rising prices across online and
social platforms on a day-to-day basis. Since the start of 2022, we’ve seen a
72% increase in US online consumer conversations related to economic anxiety.
All CPG product categories are affected as prices begin to rise, and consumer
behaviour begins to change. How is this effecting Snacking brands? Let’s find
out… What’s happening in snacking? Using TRENDSCOPE, our end-to-end insight and
innovation platform, we’ve tracked and analysed how over 69 million consumer
conversations and 12,000 trends are being influenced by the Cost-of-Living
Crisis. There has been a 56% increase in economic discussion connected to
Snacking. As inflation continues to rise, consumers are vocalising their
changing preferences and behaviours. But it’s not all bad news. While many
consumers are looking for ways to save pennies, others are driven by much more
nuanced sets of needs and motivations. There are products and brands for which
people are justifying the price-tag. Growth territories in which consumers focus
on affordability, not cost. Where the benefits or value of the product outweigh
the expense. These are the areas in which Snacking brands have an opportunity to
innovate. Where can snacking brands innovate? The chart below depicts the ten
biggest growth drivers in Snacking. If you look closely, we’ve detailed the
economic scrutiny within each of these drivers. While products related to Desire
for Natural and Mental Wellbeing are driving the highest volume of price-based
conversations, they’re also driving most of the dialogue around value and
justifying the price-tag. These are two spaces in which consumers are willing
spend despite their financial concerns. This is where they perceive value to be.
And as such, these are the growth areas in which Snacking brands should innovate
to keep up with consumers over the coming 12 months. Download the full report
Our team of Insight & Innovation Consultants have put together a full report on
how Snacking brands can innovate during the Cost-of-Living Crisis. It includes
three strategic recommendations for how to innovate within the Snacking
category, including: Which ingredients to include in future new product
development How to position Snacking brands in line with consumer preferences
How to optimise your current product portfolio and unlock greater sales Download
the full report HERE
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The Cost-of-Living Crisis is here, and everyone’s talking about it, taking to
online forums and sites to voice their frustrations. Since the beginning of the
year, we’ve seen a 72% increase in online dialogue around economic concerns
across all CPG product categories.
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We’re entering tricky economic waters. Rapid inflation has created a
cost-of-living crisis on the heels of a pandemic, with consumers struggling to
pay for everyday goods. As raw material costs rise and disposable incomes
shrink, the CPG industry is starting to feel the squeeze.
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