Valuing the Voice of the Retailer in Product Innovation
The statistic that less than 1 in 5 new CPG items succeed is something we at Mission-Field are dedicated to changing. One of the many changes we have instituted in our up-front innovation discovery effort - Lightning Strike - is allowing teams to acquire retailer insights earlier in the innovation development process.
Collecting retailer insights early on when you are developing a new product opportunity helps teams to build better ideas and pivot in ways that strengthen the overall proposition. The insights born from the retailer's point of view, from strategies they have for categories, and from shopping experiences help to sharpen an innovator's sales story and how to best impact the shopping experience in a category or aisle – allowing innovation teams to create a highly differentiated product offering that consumers love and retailers can recognize as deserving their commitment.
Mission Field conducts our retailer insight process through a series of blinded interviews, using a fully vetted discussion guide, with a goal of delivering insights that helps to direct projects to the intersection of consumer and retailer value propositions. We validate that a new product concept really is new; we have surprised more than one innovation team that their concept had been previously launched and failed. We seek to understand what is working and what is not, and we validate and discover trends that retailers are keen on exploiting.
Given not all departments and categories are managed the same way, and that our clients desire to expand into new category spaces, we also spend time confirming business model inputs such as retailer margin, promotion norms, and a variety of operational requirements such as shrink. When you’re ready for to develop your next innovation breakthrough, we would encourage you to look to Mission Field to help illuminate both the consumer and the retailer opportunity and create the most powerful win-win scenario for your new item launch.