Author: Tony Marcello

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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Whenever you have an 80% failure rate, you are going to have a lot of reasons why something is not working. The four reasons I’ve seen why innovation doesn’t always work are, firstly, just understanding consumer behavior.

The second one is in product development, and the third one is in communicating the product or the first moment of truth. And finally, in marketing support – which I don’t have a lot of experience in because I am not a marketing person, but I do see a lot of issues there. I think we sometimes try to get more information out of consumers than what is realistic. When you show the consumers a concept or a product, or a package, it’s pretty easy for them to say that they like it or if they don’t. What is really difficult is questioning beyond that – such as ‘when do you think you would use this product’ or ‘who would use this product’, ‘how do you think it is going to taste’ – some of these things are difficult to really understand because sometimes we get good answers, but sometimes we don’t – and so I think we expect a bit too much.

Another big thing is the whole ‘do-say’ gap of what consumers say versus what they do, so what I try to do to build empathy is putting myself in consumers’ shoes about the questions we are asking.