It’s a well-known fact that the majority of new FMCG products fail in their first year, costing billions of dollars in lost sales opportunity and product write-off. The obvious question to ask is; why are these products failing ?
A Harvard Business Review article written by Joan Schnieder and Julie Hall stated; “The biggest problem we’ve encountered is lack of preparation” and whilst many companies put a lot of effort into designing, manufacturing, launching and supporting new products into the marketplace, they often fail to put the necessary time and investment into validating the product and concept before it starts to gain traction through the New Product Development Process.
We need to be willing to fail fast and fail early so the losses related to such failures are minimised. Validating concepts with the target market and channels prior to formal product development is a crucial step that is often overlooked or bypassed by many companies with the majority of time and investment focusing on product and packaging development as well as launch plans.
Marketers need to be empowered and supported to fail in innovation development and be encouraged to challenge long standing beliefs aroundcustomer attitudes and product categoriesas well as the internal opinions, challenges and priorities that often occur between the different functions of an organisation.
Focus Insights works closely with companies of all shapes and sizes in providing cost effective and agile Concept and Product Validation research services which can be deployed instantly into the market with census based results being delivered back in days. What happens next depends on these results. If the concept or product isn’t validated, it may just be a matter of tweaking the concept or back to the drawing board. However failure at this stage is far more palatable and less costly than delivering a finished product into the market which fails to meet the hurdle rates and has to be removed from the marketplace or deleted by the retailer.
Through the digitisation of market research and agile research platforms like GLOW (glowfeed.com), companies now have the ability and opportunity to significantly reduce the failure rates of new products in the marketplace and in turn increase their ROI and bottom lines.
So take on the challenge… Fail Fast and Fail Early!
ABOUT FOCUS INSIGHTS: Insights is on a mission to democratise data. Focus Insights has partnered with the world’s leading data collection, consumer panel and technology providers to deliver Shopper and Consumer insights to its clients in a matter of days and at a fraction of the cost of traditional methods. Focus Insights has the ability to reach over 60,000,000 consumers across 94 countries. For more information please contact us.