Delivering a good product experience is essential to repeat purchase and will help drive organic sales growth.  Most consumers will not re-buy an inferior product – no matter how cheap it is.  People are willing to compromise on product quality when buying a cheaper product, but there is a limit.

At a recent research conference in Sydney, Damian Young – General Manager Marketing at Chobani, spoke about Chobani’s success story and the strategy they used to drive sales from around $200k when they first launched in Australia in 2011, to over $90 million in 2016.

Young explained that they had a low media budget and had to come up with a sound strategy to drive growth in the presence of many long standing competitors like Yoplait and Ski.  There were four key parts:

·         to make a great product,

·         make it available for sale,

·         get people to try it, and

·         invite people to talk about it.

Young stressed the importance of delivering a great product experience and measuring it.  People are no longer fooled by pretty packaging.  He said “If you make a crap product now or deliver a crap service there’s nowhere to hide”.  Social media can quickly turn into your worst enemy if you don’t deliver on expectations.

Chobani have a philosophy that ‘The product has to be right’ and they do not compromise on quality.  Young said “It takes four litres of milk to make a litre of Chobani yoghurt, and it takes one litre of milk to make a litre of Yoplait”.  This is how Chobani achieves its amazing thick and creamy texture, and high protein content (without the use of additives) and why it commands double the price point of Yoplait. 

Chobani have their own field team that give away a million pots of yoghurt each year. Product trial is a clever strategy to use when you have a great tasting premium priced product, as people can appreciate the quality of the product for themselves without the initial outlay.  Once consumers have tried it, they are converted. 

Streets deployed a similar strategy in the 1990’s when they introduced Magnum.  Magnum was double the price of the most expensive ice-cream at the time – Heart, however, the product was worth it.  People where happy to uptrade from Hearts ice-cream and compound chocolate to Magnum’s super premium ice-cream and Belgium chocolate. 

Is making a great product part of your marketing strategy?

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The post HOW TO DRIVE SALES IN YOUR FMCG’S. PRICE REDUCTION IS NOT ALWAYS THE ANSWER appeared first on Benchmark Sensory Strategy & Research.

Food manufactures add sugar to their products to make them taste good. Have you ever tried a biscuit without sugar? It is bland and tasteless. A product like chocolate is too bitter and almost inedible when sugar is absent. Sweetness is required, in some form and amount, to help make our food palatable.

Food labelling laws require manufacturers to clearly list all ingredients and display a nutrition panel – including % daily intake for sugars. The sugar content of some products is surprising, but nothing is hidden and nothing is secret.

Consumers need to be better educated on how to understand nutrition panels, make good food choices, and avoid over eating. Research has shown that when consumers are informed about the nutritional content of food, they make healthier choices.

Dr Robert McBride, my mentor and expert in consumer behaviour and sensory psychology, was asked on the program if we should be giving up sugar, his answer was “No, absolutely not. It’s one of the pleasures of life. We need these pleasures”.

It is this pleasure we get from eating great tasting food that helps us decide which brands we buy and which ones we avoid. A food product must taste good for us to consider buying it again and for it to succeed in the market place.

In the last few years consumers have been demanding foods with less sugar and/or alternative natural sweeteners (eg stevia, honey, rice malt syrup, maple syrup, coconut sugar, agave nectar etc).  Many big food manufacturers are responding with new products or reformulations, and new players are entering the market.

Food manufacturers need to be cautious with how they address this trend. When a well-liked product is tampered with and replaced with an inferior tasting offering, it is only a matter of days before consumers start venting on Twitter or Facebook. Take Coca Cola’s Vitaminwater in the US as an example. It had long been criticised as being too high in sugar, so last year Coca Cola decided to reduce the sugar and reformulate. Within days of the new formulation hitting the shelves, loyal users wrote comments on the Vitaminwater Facebook page like “The new taste is nasty. You just lost a customer. I can’t drink it now.” Coca Cola went in to damage control and were eventually forced to return to the original formula.

So how do food manufactures avoid costly mistakes like Vitaminwater in the US? They need to start with a good strategy. They must first determine if they can reformulate the existing product and achieve a near identical sensory profile to the current offering. It is critical that this is properly researched with regular users of the product to ensure that alienation wouldn’t occur and sales would continue. If it is not possible to produce a near identical product, then a separate new reduced sugar variant would need to be introduced. This new variant must also be acceptable to the target market, otherwise it will fail to take off. After learning important lessons, Coca Cola released a new reduced sugar variant a few months ago – Coke Life. This time they got the taste right.

I think it’s fair to say that when consumed in moderation, sugar is a harmless addition to most people’s diet. Better nutrition education is required to help make informed choices and tackle its overconsumption. As consumers, we should be able to continue to buy the products we love and enjoy and make our own decisions. Food manufacturers should continue to work on reduced sugar offerings, but they need to be diligent with any changes they make to their current product formulations.

The post Sugar. Is it Really the “Dietary Villain of Our Time” and What are Food Manufacturers to Do? appeared first on Benchmark Sensory Strategy & Research.

When asked what research had been conducted during the NPD process, the answer was none.  Some rudimentary tastings were conducted around the lab table and that was it.  We suggested that an unbranded/blind taste test of the product range be carried out with their target market to determine if the products were performing at an acceptable ‘market ready’ level.  Not surprisingly, the research revealed that the drinks were less than satisfactory on tasting.  None of the variants met the benchmark for an acceptable product to be launched into the market place.

This was a classic example of a great concept and brand, with a poor product.  The brand and pack generated trial, but the inferior product was the barrier to repeat purchase.

Conducting sensory research with your target market is an essential part of any NPD process.  This can help avoid any negative impact on your brand, and the huge costs associated with a failed product.  Don’t let an under performing product ruin your new idea’s chance of success.

The post Get Your Pack Right, But Don’t Ignore What’s Inside It appeared first on Benchmark Sensory Strategy & Research.

Consumer sensory research is usually conducted prior to the launch of a new product.  We therefore get to see the standard produced by many different R&D teams.  Some only ever produce mediocre products that require many changes and usually further sensory research.  Some are inconsistent and either hit or miss the target, while others consistently produce market ready products. It is the latter group that provide cost efficiencies for their company and the best chance of success for their new product.

We can all think of brands that consistently produce good products.  With this, our perceptions of the brands quality and trustworthiness are high.  When these brands launch a new product, we usually are keen to buy it and ‘give it a go’ as it will almost certainly deliver on expectations.

Having a great R&D team with the capability to produce consistently good products is an important asset to every FMCG producer.

The post A Great Innovations/R&D Team are Worth Their Weight in Gold appeared first on Benchmark Sensory Strategy & Research.