Category: Challenges

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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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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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.

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There are a lot of potential opportunities out there. One thing that we do is make sure we’re pretty grounded in what people’s actual barriers are. We’ve identified two key barriers for consumers, and the first is what we like to think about as the input.

It’s the fact that sustainability can be overwhelming and confusing; even people who are pretty engaged with it are just confused with something as easy as recycling.

For instance, can I throw my wine bottle with my magazines or with a water bottle? Or do these have to be separated? There’s certainly a barrier on the input side of it, but then on the other side of the coin is the barrier in the output. This is an important one as well because even if people are dedicated and engaged and put in the time to figure out the ins and outs of what they can be doing, it’s often frustrating for people because they feel like the impact of this isn’t enough. “I’m just one human being.” “This is just one straw that I didn’t get with my ice coffee,” so it can feel like even the impact that we have isn’t meaningful enough in the whole big picture, so we look at both sides of this coin of these two key barriers as we’re trying to decide which issues to focus on.

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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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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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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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In France, we were glad to test the virtual in-store shopping test capabilities provided by EyeSee – which proved to be especially useful when retailers closed shops. This allowed us to conduct marketing tests on Chromebook as initially planned with no interruption.

In the summer, we experienced a slightly normal period when the [COVID-19] situation improved. We re-started to use traditional methodologies like quantitative and qualitative interviews – if safety conditions (like social-distancing) were respected for both vendors and users.

The new challenge was: how to detect the long-term trends and shopping behaviors that will remain after COVID-19?

We started to implement long-term trackers and identified opportunities to use the time series necessary to develop predictive models. We are still experimenting, but we should see the result in a couple of months!

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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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With all the issues the world faced over the last years, it has proven to us that we all need to work together. And working together is about attitudes. It’s about a behavioral change in attitudes – there’s one big industry that is all about that, and that is advertising. Brands spend more than 315 billion a year in the US trying to change consumer behavior and people’s attitudes. So, what if they can take a small part of that and try to accomplish both a return on investment on advertising and create big social impacts for society. This is nothing completely new. Since the early 2000s, many companies have spent a lot of money on CSR campaigns – from addressing greenhouse gas pollution to LGBT issues and Black Lives Matter. But the question nowadays is, “how far do you want to go as a brand?”. You don’t have to address them all, but pick your battles and do it in an authentic way. It’s all about learning. If brands are convinced about their purpose, they will need to learn.

One of the best ways to learn is by experimentation and doing research.

You try something out in controlled environments, measure it and learn from it, try out something new, learn from it and then release it. That’s what research is all about.