I think we’re always trying to figure out this whole first moment of truth, mainly because consumers really only take a few seconds to look at a package – or another way to look at it is that you only have a few seconds to really jump out on the shelf.

90% of the grocery shopping is stuff consumers always buy

A lot of people that I talk to will say they like to try new products, and I believe that because a lot of people do. But I don’t think it means every single category in the grocery store. My guess would be 90% of the grocery shopping is stuff they always buy, and then maybe to get to the chip aisle and are looking for something new, and they might slow down. But for the rest of that 90%, they’re just going to look for the normal stuff that they typically are buying. So if you have something new, it’s just difficult to jump out on the shelf.

I don’t really have an answer in terms of how we do it better other than – what we’ve been doing is trying to do it more. What I mean by that is, instead of doing one test where we’re trying to understand the first moment of truth, maybe we’re doing a couple or maybe we are bringing it earlier in the process to truly understand that.

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Brick-and-mortar is developing well, but we do see shoppers from brick and mortar trying e-commerce.

We do see a big trend in planned purchases such as pet care, mother and baby, household essentials are moving into online as well.

That means that our shoppers are getting more and more used to the 20-minutes delivery – a little bit more spoiled in that sense.

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With new product development, the difficult thing is that

+80% of new products fail

And while our processes changed some, because of changing consumer habits and the pandemic – really over the years, it’s just changing because when 80% of the products fail, you’re always trying to do better. So I think every company is really trying to improve their new product process and get better at it. For us,

what it really comes down to is just to better understand consumer habits, what are their wants, what are their needs

– and doing a lot of research around there to understand those habits along with just learning how to better communicate at the first moment of truth and how do we do better from a marketing support standpoint.

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Because many of the occasions have changed, we switched more from “away from home” to “at home” consumption – so the atmosphere, the energy, the context of consumption of our brands has changed. When we’re talking about the new product, consumers are more willing to try the new product.

Consumers are definitely in a position where they want to explore new products and try different types of categories.

According to some data in Europe which we have, we know that in, for example, Germany, 72% of total consumers of the age of 16 to 34 are willing to try new exotic flavors – that’s 65% in France and Spain. Among those flavors, they would like to try some of them that they’ve never tried, so they can kind of transform themselves to the areas of the world they are now not able to travel. Knowing that we at Coca-Cola definitely we’re thinking about some exotic flavors that we can offer to our consumers to satisfy that need. COVID-19 also brought the overall health concern – so now consumers are looking at the drinks and foods as a vehicle for better health. Functionalities are getting more traction and that is something that we are paying attention to. The consumers are also looking to support as well – they are interested in immunity, boosting their energy, improving gut health and concentration, managing the mood, and many other products features out that were not so typical prior to COVID-19.

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With a decision tree output, its beauty is in the simplicity of it – it really helps you and your stakeholders make sense of all of it at a glance. As you go down the diagram, you discover new and deeper info and you begin to understand how consumers discern between products, even if it doesn’t fully align with what is on the shelf or your ingoing assumptions. Of course, the most important output is the behavioral decision tree which shows the behavioral importance of the product attributes.

Another valuable output that can be included is one I’m almost as excited about as the behavioral decision treemap itself. Our Brand Gain & Loss Analysis can tell you the proportion who switched from your brand to Competitive Brand X, etc., and when or who switched from Brand X to your brand and when. We can outline the 4 different types of shoppers, but this is even more granular and can show you where and to whom repertoire or loyalties lie. We also include the stated importance of the attributes, brand recall, dominant occasions, and missions, as well as ease of shopping and shelf organization.

So, you get a 360-degree view of the shopper and the shelf by using both implicit and explicit methods in a single study.

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Broadly speaking, there are two different facets to this.

There are different considerations for different products, but one thing that cuts across is the selection of things, access to all these brands, and the variety to purchase.

The selection is always going to be one of the top reasons why I would come and buy on your platform. The second aspect would be pricing: offers, deals, sales. Delivery time is also important, but it is more prevalent for folks in the metro areas who have access to a hyperlocal delivery system.

People definitely want things right here and now – that majority is coming from the metro population.

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One of the things that we do is really use social media to help us amplify our voice – and not only talk about what we’re doing as a brand but also

help people spread the word and spread sustainable ideas amongst themselves.

One example is Tom’s Of Maine – this is a brand in our portfolio that’s very dear to my heart. They do an excellent job with social media and using it not only to drive energy and excitement for what we’re doing as a brand but also provide an opportunity for our brand enthusiasts to build momentum amongst themselves and talk about what they’re doing in a sustainable world. They can share their tips and tricks, showcase some of the things that they might be doing along with the brand or separate from the brand to help drive sustainability and messages home.

I think it’s a really great example of how we leverage word of mouth to drive credibility but also to continue the enthusiasm around the sustainability topic more broadly.

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I would say the ability to build a lifelike experience for the respondents and have a fully experimental design that you can control is the greatest advantage of using behavioral, contextual studies. They provide very high ROI since they allow for so much experimentation, testing iterations, validating your assumptions with real respondents in a natural setting while capturing the implicit unbiased behavioral measurements.
We have a team that works hard to create cutting-edge environments and protocols for any kind of testing you can imagine – new industries, new consumer experiences, but also new ways of testing staples like packaging, advertising, and NPDs. Another thing I’d like to point out here is that

we love to build behavioral versions of things that were usually tested without this essential dimension.

As we grow, tech will continue to be one of the areas on which we spend the most
time focused on as a company.

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For me, quick commerce is the space to go. It is very different from e-commerce, but it is a version of it that is much quicker. Instead of next day or 24 hours delivery, we will deliver within 20 to 25 minutes.

That’s the concept of Quick commerce – that is the space to grow, especially for impulse brands that do not thrive as much in the e-commerce sphere

– categories such as snacks, beverages, alcohol but also more planned purchases such as diapers, household, milk formula, etc. – they’re all growing as we speak. We do see that alcohol, snacks, beverages are more of an impulse purchase and not thriving as much, so I feel that quick commerce is the way to go.

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Research is a large name covering many diverse fields. Today I can provide you with a POV on the marketing and ads research that I developed for Google: our mission is to generate actionable insights that put the user in their context at the heart of business decisions.

As our users’ behaviors have evolved over the past years and have become more complex, innovating is definitely key to developing actionable insights.

You can create innovation at every step while respecting user privacy and vendors safety: it can be about opening new areas of thought, challenging well-known marketing frameworks (like rethinking the purchasing behaviors – aka the Messy Middle – through behavioral science), testing new methodologies to improve our operational marketing (like the virtual shopping capabilities created by EyeSee). But how do we do this? It is important to create a space for innovation by partnering and brainstorming with many diverse research companies, from startups building experimentations to large and well-known research companies established in many countries. It is an interactive process as we can also share best practices or new methodologies with our vendors or research guidelines created by our researchers (like sharing UX requirements for mobile questionnaires) to improve research quality.

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Once you get into strategy with some depth, you realize that there are different ways in which consumer insights can be leveraged – some are more strategic and some more tactical or opportunistic. We acknowledge that there are different types of insights, and part of understanding what you’ve got when you have an insight is understanding what it’s really useful for. That depends on a number of factors, contextual factors too. So whether insight is relevant depends on the context into which you are trying to create communications, change consumers’ or brand’s behavior. The issue with strange periods like COVID-19 or Black Lives Matter is that the gauges of relevance become skewed in the short term. For example, during the pandemic, there was a lot of advertising that looked and felt the same. One of the things that happen in those circumstances is that insight that feels like they are very relevant at the moment turns out to be very generic and not particularly relevant.

That’s where smart marketers need to do a combination of things and remind themselves what’s really at the heart of their brand, business, and consumer.

They have to stick to the kind of consistency that their brand has in its industry and marketplace and take a step back and observe. The experience will tell you when a situation is volatile and not conducive to making those decisions. A precious few companies seem to be able to rein that in during COVID- 19 in 2020.

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There are a number of lessons that I’ve learned over the years in innovation – one being that

people just seem more comfortable and more honest when they are in their own house.

They have an easier time admitting that maybe they had a chocolate donut for breakfast, or that they have chips sometimes in the afternoon, or that maybe they don’t always read the nutrition facts on the back of a package.

They are more comfortable and it seems like just our insights are just a lot better.

So, that’s one of those things that I’m definitely going to be carrying forward.

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First of all, I think climate change has really become much more tangible. In the past, we’ve heard it as something that seemed a little bit fuzzy, a little bit vague, maybe something that would impact the next generation. It didn’t feel as real or here and now as it does today. Two big trends have emerged.

1. The first is urgency. People have a significant urgency to take action. We see this not only because people are seeing the good, cleaner air and skies, especially through the early days of lockdown, but also because they’re seeing the bad. I heard from so many consumer interviews that through COVID, it suddenly became very apparent to them how much trash they produce as an individual and a household. In the pre-COVID world, your trash on any given day would be spread between home and the office, school, restaurant, and gym, etc. And all of a sudden, we’re in lockdown, and every bit of trash you create is sitting in the kitchen trash bin – that was a very rude awakening for people, and it really helped drive an urgency to take action.
2. But the second trend is that consumers are feeling a little bit stuck. People just aren’t sure where to start, and that really helps us think about what we can do as a manufacturer to make sure it’s easy for people to be unstuck.

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In North America, the market for research, data, and analysis has never been more vibrant and more evolving, and one of the things to remember is that clients don’t want to renew their research relationships every week, every month, or even every year. What clients are looking for is relationships with research providers, which allow them to consistently deliver good consumer understanding to their business without having to renew it and refresh it all the time. That puts pressure on research companies to evolve without being pushed to. The providers that I was most inspired by are always the ones that brought changes to me and treated is as a partnership. In client-agency relationships presenting and visualizing data often gets neglected and left up to the clients to think about how they want to visualize it internally, and some clients like that degree of control; it’s crazy not to share an agenda for how data is presented, especially to people who don’t deal with data every hour of every day. So for me, that was always a very big deal –

How can we get better at showing data? Data that can be easily understood can also be easily leveraged and used – and it was always a big deal.

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The more relevant question is – should you be part of that conversation or not? What we’ve seen during COVID is that in the beginning, every brand was saying the same thing: we understand these are difficult times, but here’s how are cookies, cars, or hand lotion is the best solution under these current difficult circumstances. It just doesn’t make sense – consumers are very smart and educated, and they’ll pull through that very quickly. In fact, I believe it can become counterproductive because you can get the ridicule of consumers, and you become a hashtag or something like that.

What we’ve learned from the research is that if you can find that natural, logical place that makes sense at that moment and the consumer can relate to who you are in that moment – then it makes perfect sense to do that.

It can enrich and enhance communication because it can actually make you more relevant and make you stand out from the competition. But if the opposite is true, when it sort of feels dragged into it, not relevant and kind of virtue signaling, consumers are not going to buy into that. They know when they’re being taken for granted or taken in a direction that doesn’t make sense. The best-case scenario is that they’ll make fun of you for 15 seconds on Twitter, or, in the worst-case scenario, you will have to pull ads and do all sorts of other things. Be very careful and find the natural interaction with it.

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Many things. First of all – the agile approach is something that we as a big system could not say was one of our key advantages in the past. We are heavily learning from small companies and are now applying many agile principles in the way we operate. Uncertainty is something that is an everyday situation that small companies are managing.

For us, being big, we were trying to remove uncertainties – but now we are learning how to accept it as a way of doing business and dealing with it each and every day.

Many small companies have a super-efficient and authentic vision and mission with a purpose – which when you are big and with a wide portfolio means you need to cover the needs of a different part of the business so you can not be so focused on the vision and mission. Then there is high engagement internally among the employees and externally, especially with the consumers. Something which they can be really proud of, and we are learning from them and trying to apply consistent interaction with their consumer and basing the business model on that interaction. And finally – alternative channels. Big companies usually tend to go to the mainstream channels to distribute products there, while smaller companies are trying to go the other way around and plug into the alternative channels to build the brand and the product there.

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I would say we really work to understand consumers’ unmet needs and then try to figure out what are the products that fit those needs. But, that isn’t perfect because, for example, when Apple introduced the iPhone, they introduced a product that consumers didn’t even know they needed – that obviously became a gigantic success.

So, along with just trying to understand what our consumers’ unmet needs are, we are trying to understand what are their needs they don’t even know that they have.

At a high level, it really involves a lot of both quantitative and qualitative research.

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The biggest thing is talking to a wide variety of stakeholders: working in our field teams, directly with our partners, corporate teams that design the corporate strategy, and the Go-to-market team. It can seem really disparate when you think about the complexity and what each of those individual teams is looking for.

So it’s really important when I’m designing a study that I understand each of those cohorts.

I want to learn more about what are the things they are thinking about this year or the next few months. So what I typically will do is write a research brief, and I’ll typically send that to each of the stakeholders as well, and make sure that I have alignment. Once I have it, that’s when I reach out to the vendor.

Getting everyone aligned not only helps me get a very clear and concise view of what I am looking for but also helps me ensure I have a good partnership with my vendors right off the gate.

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Sephora has done an excellent job of making it easy to shop and navigate. They have their ‘Clean by Sephora’ logo that’s easy to find in-store or if you’re online. It’s easy to click in and filter, and it gives you peace of mind that everything that’s labeled is eco-friendly and good for the planet. Thrive Market is another one that I often hear when I’m doing consumer interviews, as a place where people go just because it’s almost a mental shortcut. They know that if they’re buying from Thrive Market, it will be eco-friendly, not toxic, good for their bodies, and good for the world. Another example on the brand side is Ethique shampoo bars. They started as a solid shampoo, but now they’ve launched into other adjacent categories and waterless solutions.

From the moment you enter their website, their direct consumer experience online is clear and easy to navigate.

It’s in the very human and culturally relevant language. Then, when you get the product shipped home, they make the unboxing spirit fun. Some of the shampoo bars are heart-shaped, which is just a great thing to experience when you’re taking on a new sustainable product form. Finally, the product usage itself can be quite pleasant. That’s an example for me of a brand that’s gone above and beyond delivering on basic category benefits, like cleaning into an experience that actually surprises and delights people along the way.

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One of the big differences that I can see is the different brand landscapes and different types of emerging business models. For instance, in France, the main contributor is the drive – pick out in-store. In the ASEAN region, which is very different from one country to another, you have a big emergence of bricks and clicks. In Australia, 4-5 years ago, the market was at around 3-4% in e-commerce, and it is now slightly moving – and generating more than 10%. There has been a big shift with the emergence of online purchases, which can take various forms. Bricks and clicks have been developing themselves strongly towards e-commerce: in the Middle East, you have the appearance of players like aggregators – platforms that will connect the consumer with the closest store. But at the same time, lots of different players are emerging everywhere, and obviously, the strong presence of Alibaba Group in all South-East Asian countries and Amazon in the Middle East and Japan.

In this landscape, you cannot have a one-size-fits-all approach.

It is really about understanding the different environments, mapping the players, and learning the different patterns so you can build a strategy.

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The most important step is to fully understand the job to be done with the product. At the end of the day, a product has to work, or people won’t use it – even if it’s the most sustainable option. An example we have is the Colgate toothbrush. It’s called Colgate Keep. It’s called that way because you keep the handle, and you only change out the brush head, so it’s a great solution for a manual toothbrush where you’re using 80% less plastic because you keep the aluminum handle forever. But again, we had to really make sure that the product performs as somebody would expect a normal toothbrush to perform – so we did a lot of work on the brush head to make sure the performance was there. We really had to make sure that it delivered on cleaning and a comfortable experience. Then we talked about sustainability as an added benefit.

That’s one thing that we’ve learned – leaning fully on sustainability isn’t enough. It might drive novelty and trial, but it’s not enough to drive repeat.

You really need to fulfill a consumer’s job to be done in order to continue them on in the process.

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That question has become so much more complex even in the last few years. I think we take a very cognizant approach to peeling back the onion. One of the things we’ve done internally is that we really focused on greater collaboration and conversation between the different groups to make sure that we’re not operating silos. For instance, we have consistent forums where we have people come together across our functions that are focused on sustainability, whether that’s marketing or supply chain, finance, legal procurement. We really want to make sure that we use those forums to surface any opportunities and challenges.

It’s just a great way to think about our pipeline and how we keep sustainability integrated into the everyday fabric of the business.

The second thing we do more externally is keeping a pulse on where consumers are at, especially through COVID-19, but certainly, beyond as well – thinking about how people’s perceptions of sustainability have changed and how they’re evolving, and what people’s behaviors and challenges and what’s on their radar screen.

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There is a simple but effective framework we devised for interpreting the results and identifying consumer segments. Based on our tests, we realized that there are 4 types of shoppers when it comes to brand loyalty.

The first group are the instant switchers who abandon the brands immediately after the 1st round of shopping in the out-of-stock exercise and don’t pick the brand in the later steps. The second group are the switchers, who abandon the brand between the 2nd and 5th shopping exercise and don’t return to the brand by the end of it. We call the third group the risky ones – they abandon the brand at some point but come back to their initial choice in 5th attempt. And finally, the fourth group are the loyal shoppers – they are consistently buying the same brand in all the out-of-stock exercises.

When you know how the sample spreads across each of these 4 types of consumers, you can start to think about how to assist their shopping

and ensure your brand is not ignored due to a bad planogram or that you have a chance as a replacement for your competitor, and from where do these buyers come, what triggers them to make the switch. It very clearly ranks consumer priorities – if a shelf is not executed properly, it is frustrating and can affect sales.

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Innovation is just inherent in our culture. We are expected to innovate, and we have innovation budgets to use. The other challenge in doing innovative research is that stakeholders usually pay for the majority of the research, and I have to execute it. So with that, they hold their money in their budget very sacred – what that means is that it’s a lot easier to rinse and repeat. If you’re doing something more innovative, it is scarier, and you are taking a lot bigger risk. It is not just a risk of the stakeholder and me, but also of the business and all retail partnerships that we have – there is a lot at stake. So I really gauge how to approach innovation based on whether or not my stakeholder really wants to play and try new things or if they are a little more apprehensive. I will typically start with something more comfortable but then push the boundaries. So, for example, it’s a lot easier to say we’re making a quantitative approach with this study. We do those all the time, but if we do this quantitative study, we push this other little piece on top of it; it unlocks a whole different area. Are we willing to try that?

So I am just ticking away at those things and building on what’s comfortable, but always thinking a couple of steps ahead of what the stakeholder’s needs.

I think that’s where you get a nice secret sauce.