https://embed-ssl.wistia.com/deliveries/dfad95dfbe4f7daa4623e0a0dfc91de7.mp4
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.