How Innovation Can Fuel Strategy for the Next Five Years
Many industries have experienced growth and disruption in the last several years, and the nutritional supplement category is no different. Contemporary brands are emerging while existing brands stretch to create hybrid offers. The COVID-19 pandemic amplifying this disruption even further—with some companies struggling to keep afloat. Brands need to pivot quickly and lean on innovation experts to make sense of this highly competitive market. Let’s look at a recent example from this category to see how innovation can helps brands better understand consumer engagement.
The Challenge
Recent innovation in the nutritional supplement category has focused on functional benefits through enhancements in forms and flavor. However, understanding what the next five years looked like for the category was critical to finding the space where a brand could play and win.
Partnering Together for a Solution
The brand partnered with Gongos to enable the innovation, brand marketing and insights teams to better understand the engagement they are seeing with their customers already, as well as the scope of consumers in their category. Together the team was able to define the future landscape and trends that impact it and develop territories to explore where the brand can stretch and build positioning strategies. Specifically, the work:
- Engaged in foresight, trends, and domain mapping exercises that helped us understand the influence of macro-trends, potential disruptors so that we could ‘speak-future’ to consumers and identify unarticulated needs
- Quantified consumer consumption paths, attitudes, usage, and the market landscape through synthesis of the competitive landscape, existing knowledge, sales data, adjacent category activity, etc. which helped define how the category may take new shape in 5+ years
- Quantified future unarticulated needs through proxy’s that enabled consumers to understand and identify what could be important for them in the future
- Developed short-and long-term strategies for multi-functional teams, marketing plans, and assessment of brand equity that is used for innovation and brand work
Key Deliverables
The work resulted in a Future of Nutritional Supplements guidebook that included:
- Future domain maps that educate on potential disruption and change across multiple areas
- Opportunity territories that guide new product development
- Deep dive of consumer consumption to inform territories of potential shifts in behavior
- Barriers, triggers, and emotional and future needs that go beyond functional attributes to help drive emotional connections
Click image to enlargeThe Impact
Gongos developed an innovation roadmap and informed short-and long-term brand positioning solutions to guide this brand through the volatility and competition that lie ahead for this industry.
