Harnessing Everyday Consumer Hacks for CPG Innovation

Developing breakthrough innovation concepts is about understanding your audience deeply, recognizing patterns, and leveraging insights about their behavior. It’s about observing and understanding nuances of how consumers use products, including their habits and workarounds.

Consider how people often take a product and modify it to suit their needs better. They create “hacks.” In the tech world, hackathons are common practices to improve products and security. Similarly, people have their own hacks for everyday products, turning imperfections into better solutions. Observing these hacks can be a goldmine for CPG innovation.

For example, a simple product like a stick of butter has various uses: chopping it into chunks, melting it into sauces, spreading it on toast, or rubbing it around a frying pan while camping. Observing how people behave, their “hacks,” around these different uses can lead to innovative concepts. For instance, if your kids prefer scraping butter off the top, you might invent a better knife or a new butter form, like a tube.

Or think about frozen meals: If you use frozen meals and cook for your family, not just yourself, you must make a variety of dishes. You need multiple pots or different equipment because you might have meat, carbs, grains, and vegetables that require different cooking times and temperatures. You might need to put two things into the oven simultaneously.

When you consider behaviors around this pattern, you might see that consumers often mess up the timing because different equipment heats at different rates. Your stove might take 15 minutes to warm up, while your toaster oven takes five. Getting everything ready at the perfect temperature at the same time is a struggle. There might be an opportunity to create a product that simplifies this process.

You’re probably familiar with practical approaches to innovation like Blue Ocean Strategy that emphasize finding unique ways to approach challenges. Often, innovation focuses on the biggest and boldest ideas, but neglects concepts based on the repeated habits people have.

The key to breakthrough CPG innovation is not necessarily to make consumers think differently but to observe what they do—observing everyday behaviors—and leverage those insights. By understanding why people do things the way they do, you can unlock huge innovation opportunities—unique, practical solutions that resonate with your target market.

Seeking more intel on your target consumer behavior? Reach out to us at hello@mission-field.com.