Retail Voodoo is a brand development firm. Our past clients include Starbucks, KIND, REI, Essentia, Pepsi, HighKey and many other market leaders. We provide strategic brand positioning and design
services for leading brands in the food, wellness, beverage, and fitness industries. If your goal is to increase market share, drive growth or disrupt the marketplace with new, innovative ideas —give us a call and let‘s talk.
How to Focus Your Innovation Process for Truly Breakthrough Products Transform
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Written by David Lemley President and Head of Strategy at Retail Voodoo
No matter what type of engagement we’re working on, our conversations with the clients we advise inevitably raise questions about product innovation. What kinds of products should we add to our lineup over the next three to five years? How can we keep retailers excited about our brand with new offerings? What do consumers need — or what do they not yet know that they need — from us? Where will the brand’s substantial growth come from?
Innovation is the lifeblood of any food or beverage brand. A steady stream of new products keeps the brand relevant, dynamic, and profitable.
But we know that great ideas aren’t enough. So how can your brand team transform possibilities into breakthrough, actionable products that will drive preference, create significant barriers to entry for competitors, and hockey-stick your revenue?
Gathering a group of people to brainstorm the Next Big Thing is exciting work. But without strategic discipline and brand guardrails, your team risks launching a bunch of duds. Make sure you have these four pillars in place to frame your team’s innovation process.
1. A culture of innovation.
Innovation requires an entrepreneurial mindset; that’s why so many multinationals are grabbing up spunky startups with radical product ideas. If your organization tends to squelch fresh thinking or move slowly, dedicate a trusted leader to oversee a skunkworks department that works autonomously to develop new products.
2. A commitment to real disruption, not just line extension.
Look beyond features and benefits as you’re exploring product ideas. It’s relatively easy to add a coconut macadamia version to your snackbar lineup or introduce a trendy ingredient like fonio to your formulation. Because it’s easy for you, it’s also easy for retailers to add to their store brands.
3. A deep understanding of your customer.
So how do you move from iteration to real innovation? By understanding how the brand fits into and enriches your customers’ lives. Most new products
are solutions in search of needs. Innovation happens when you tap into deep consumer insight (of your current and desired audience) to find their unmet needs and make brand-driven products to meet those needs.
4. A solid brand strategy.
Capital-B Brand — your promise to the world and the ways in which you keep it — is the lens you’ll evaluate all the possible ideas through and select those you’ll green-light. Strategy defines what we call the brand’s “range of acceptable stretch”. In other words, how far you can push your product line in a way that still makes sense to your audience?
Innovation is a cross-functional activity, not a silo. So who should be at the table?
Let’s break the innovation process into two phases: Ideation and Selection.
Ideation answers the question, “If we can make anything, what could we make?” The conversation is all about unfiltered possibility.
It should involve a broad group of people with different perspectives on the business, including:
The C-suite — they may have ideas of their own, but the more important reason is that this process allows them to interact with staffers they aren’t familiar with. Too, it lets them hear from others about all the possibilities for the brand.
R&D — that their input is key seems obvious; remember that they also bring biases to brainstorming.
For every idea that’s discussed, they’ll be mentally dissecting ingredient costs and production line requirements and margin. These guardrails are ultimately helpful, but they can derail unfettered ideation at this stage of the process.
Sales — they’re hearing from channel partners about what the market wants and have a strong sense of the competitive set and price elasticity. They also bring the internal swagger of the organization. Their advocacy can advance or kibosh any idea.
Marketing — this also seems like a no-brainer, but if the company is trying to do product development fast and cheap, marketers are usually not included in innovation conversations. Marketers bring to the table a deep understanding of consumers and retail partners because their work focuses on those two audiences. They understand what real people want from the brand. And when both
marketing and sales are involved in ideation, that combination of perspectives is magical.
People you might not think about — among the marketing team, we advise including the creative director and/or lead copywriter, who touch the brand every day and have great ideas. You need people who are at ground level.
Thinking is the fun and sexy stuff; picking the winners and transforming those ideas into reality for the brand requires a smaller group. Which brings us to the Selection phase. Selection answers the question,
“If we can make anything, what should we make?”
We advise our clients to focus on five to seven new products over
a 12-month period, on a rolling schedule over three to five years. This cadence keeps retailers excited about the brand without overwhelming them. It piques consumers’ interest because they’re always seeing something new from you. And it forces competitors to scramble.
Say you have 50 ideas, 25 of which the larger team is excited about and five of which you have capacity to pursue. Turning those ideas into viable, desirable products requires a tighter group focused on setting priorities. These are typically people who report directly into the Chief Grown Officer: Sales, marketing, and R&D.
This smaller team’s job is to build the business case for each idea. Does it fall within the brand’s range of acceptable stretch? Does the brand strategy support this idea?
Before you even take the product recipe into your test kitchen, R&D collaborates with procurement to tackle costing, pricing, sourcing, and manufacturing to ensure that this tasty product you’ve imagined can actually be made in the real world. Operations weighs in on whether the product can be made and packaged in your existing or co-manufacturer facility — including addressing whether adding these ingredients to your facility requires any change in your labeling on existing products, like gluten or allergens.
From there, you’ll create edible/ drinkable samples in a test kitchen and develop formulations for manufacturing the new product. Once you’ve produced a quality
Image sources: https://www.marthastewart.com/1519377/essentialspices-according-test-kitchen
prototype of the food or beverage, marketing is responsible for identifying how it fits into consumers’ lives. Typically, the marketing team consults with an external source to determine whether this reaches a new audience with unmet needs and whether current fans will embrace it. Importantly, this research creates an endorsement from the market that will help your sales team convince retail partners that the product is a sure hit.
In addition, it’s critical to gain the advocacy of your CFO. You’ll need them to bless the investment and then run interference with the executive team or investors so that the idea doesn’t have to hit a P&L home run instantly. Their support will give the new product time to succeed.
Speaking of timing: Know that innovation is a two-year cycle from ideation to results. If you’re looking to a new product to save your bacon this year, you’ll be sorely disappointed.
Image sources: https://retail-voodoo.com/case-studies/launchedfrom-dtc-to-target-in-6-months/
If after two years you‘re not thinking,
“ Wow, this was a killer idea,” then there‘s a problem.
Product innovation is a paradox: You can’t shortcut the process, but you need to move quickly. You need both out-of-the-box ideation and strategic discipline. We can help your team navigate those challenges, just as we’ve helped brands like HighKey and Second Nature Snacks launch goldmine products.
With teams working remotely over the past year and a half, we’ve read all the theories about how online meetings have killed creativity and ideation. In our experience, the opposite is true.
We recently held a virtual innovation summit with a client team of nearly 30 people. Throughout the five-hour event, we experienced tons of energy and enthusiasm from the whole group, even at the very end. More to the point, we came away with a roster of powerful product ideas that we’re now helping them prioritize and develop.
Here’s how we did it:
We set the table — prior to the summit, we sent everyone care packages to their homes with samples of other brands’ products that were relevant to our discussion. We chose these items specifically to challenge their thinking and open their minds to possibility. We asked them to taste each product and make notes before the meeting.
We replicated the “theater” — Brainstorm sessions typically include a big pile of designer-y toys to get people loose and creative. Our team replicated this by sending those care packages. Turns out, the senses of taste and smell are great tools for design thinking.
We asked unexpected questions — We primed the pump by posing specific questions to the group before the meeting. Then during the workshop, we asked a whole bunch of questions they weren’t expecting, like “what types of products should we stay away from?” and “which of these products do you think we could do better?”
We managed the pacing — five hours on a Zoom call can be exhausting. We segmented the summit into 50-minute intervals made up of shorter segments and regular breaks.
We emphasized facilitation — our team worked hard to lead the discussion as tightly as we would have if we were all in the room together. We also facilitated breakout discussions with small groups to ignite ideation.
While in-person human interaction is preferable for this kind of working session, we’ve found that virtual innovation summits can be surprisingly successful with the right setup and facilitation. We can help your team brainstorm better, wherever they are.
Some brands have no room to innovate; others will come out swinging and make 40 things and not apologize for the 20 things that flop. Regardless of your innovation potential, you have to stay engaged. Keep focused, be consistent, and don’t get distracted; set a goal and a path and stick with it for at least six months unless you see a huge red flag. Progress and growth require bold vision; don’t let fear overcome your efforts now. Plunge ahead, put in the work, be patient, stick with the plan.
We’re having tons of discussions with brands now about charting a bright path through 2021 and beyond.
Let‘s talk about what‘s in your pipeline.
Footnotes & Sources
1. https://www.amazon.com/VB6Before-Weight-Restore-Health/ dp/0385344740/
2. https://www.retail-voodoo.com/ insights/brand-innovation-whenyou-can-make-anything-whatshould-you-make/
3. https://www.retail-voodoo.com/ insights/beloved-dominant-whatit-takes-for-bfy-brands-to-achieverockstar-status/
About Beloved And Dominant Brands
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About Retail Voodoo
We are a branding agency passionate about building brands that connect powerfully with consumers. The brands we partner with take a stand: For people, purpose, and planet. We guide clients to solve complex business challenges so they can evolve into category leaders that consumers actively love with their mind, body, and souls.