Pushing Beauty Innovation Boundaries with Benchmarking

A woman at the vanity with a variety of makeup and beauty tools.

Wisdom Wordui, Associate Principal Scientist at L’Oréal, takes us through his presentation at TMRE 2024, “Benchmarking the Best: Leveraging Competitive Insights to Drive New Product Development and Portfolio Optimization.”

L’Oreal has been around for the past 115 years and is regarded as a leader in the beauty industry. “It’s not surprising that we pride ourselves in saying that innovation is part of our DNA,” says Wordui.

The beauty industry is known for being in continual flux, putting much more importance on research as well as insights. He continues, “The beauty industry is a unique one in terms of the fact that change is the only constant. Trends are ever evolving. Imagine walking into this arena blindfolded. You wouldn’t survive long, would you? Data-driven insights are essential to ensure that we stay ahead of the curve, and we are offering exceptional products that meet our consumers’ needs and expectations.”

Setting the Benchmarking Strategy

Benchmarking has become a key strategy for the company to gauge strengths and weaknesses, identify key drivers, and product renovation and innovation.

“For us, benchmarking really provides a strategic compass for us to be able to continue to innovate, improve our products, and to push boundaries in the beauty industry. For our benchmarking program, our key objective is to assess the competitiveness of our portfolio, our key products and pillars against the competition, and we like to do this in a blind market context,” he points out. “A key outcome of our benchmarking program is to come up with a clear technical brief that the various teams across the business can use to drive product innovations and innovate in the beauty space.”

Benchmarking is really a collaborative effort, expanding beyond the old silo mentality at corporates and moving in a cross-disciplinary approach.

Wordui relates, “Benchmarking unites experts from around the business, from consumer science that I’m a part of, to cross functional partners in R&D, marketing and beyond. Usually, team formation is structured to ensure optimal resource allocation towards a steady life cycle. We adopt a robust methodology consisting of blind in home use test, on our key SKUs as well as competitor SKUs. We typically cast a wide consumer profile utilizing a robust sample size, typically of about 240-plus.”

He adds, “At the heart of our program is how we go about selecting products for our benchmarking studies. We take into consideration a host of factors such as current market data and dynamics. We also use a lot of market intel to decide which products would go into our benchmarking studies. We also use more objective data like Sentry and analytical data to streamline the products that would go into our benchmarking studies. Typically, we target the top ten sellers, both within our company and key external competitors.”

The consumer sample mix is also a key consideration for L’Oreal.

“For our facial cleansers benchmarking study, the design followed a blinded home use test where consumers tested products that we selected for the study. They tested the products in monadic, and we cast a wide net in terms of our consumer recruits, making sure that we included both men and women across various age groupings. They had to be facial category users. We included all skin types, skin tones, ethnicities to make sure that the testing was inclusive enough to yield actionable insights to inform our product development efforts,” says Wordui.

Innovation is the name of the game, and ultimately the company’s consumer studies help inform potential growth drivers.

“Another key output from the analysis is helping us to identify innovation opportunities,” he says. “Just going beyond relative strengths and weaknesses, we are trying to understand what can enable us to really push the boundaries of innovation in the space. By relating the impact of attributes on overall liking to the extent to which the category is delivering it, we are able to come up with four quadrants that help us to clearly identify where those innovation gaps are in the category, where no current product offering is meeting or fulfilling those consumer needs. That prioritizes our innovation efforts moving forward.”

“To drive it all home, it’s all about business impact. What can the business do with the data from our benchmarking studies? There are different ways. One of them is relating it to more analytical methods and instrumental data to come up with clear technical briefs that our various R&D teams can use. We use different approaches to really get to the crux of the matter in terms of what our user needs are, how we are meeting them, the best ways we can go around optimizing our current offerings, any innovation gaps in the category, and also workshop these insights with our cross functional partners to really drive home the business impact for our benchmarking program.”

Wordui concludes, “Benchmarking is not just something that we do to just copy the competition or stay ahead of it, but it’s something that can really help us to push the boundaries of innovation, discover new product opportunity areas, and have a leg up on our competition.”

To learn more about L’Oreal’s benchmarking studies, watch the video of Wisdom Wordui’s presentation at TMRE 2024.

Speeding Product Innovation Through Social Prediction

A woman jogging on a boardwalk.

“The Future of NPD: Why Social Prediction is a Game-Changer for Glanbia Performance Nutrition (GPN),” was presented by Nikolas Pearmine, Chief Strategy Officer at Black Swan Data, and Shiho Ng, Senior Manager, Insights & Analytics at Glanbia Performance Nutrition.

In the case study, Glanbia, an active and healthy lifestyle brand focused on nutritional products, shows how it is leveraging social prediction technology to predict future consumer behavior and deliver reliably successful product launches to market.

“We’ve been on a journey of modernizing our insights capabilities for the past couple of years since the appointment of our new vice president of insights and analytics,” says Ng. “We’ve been building a robust stack of insights capabilities so that we can continuously monitor the markets, categories, competitors, and consumers in an efficient and effective manner, as well as to allow us to spot the early trends so that we can capitalize and act upon them. And it’s really activating the insights that are extracted from various observation analysis, data analysis to drive the innovation to make it more consumer driven, consumer relevant and salient.”

Social Directions

As for Black Swan Data, the company aims to collect social data, so social media, blogs, forums, reviews, in essence, anything publicly available, and structures that data around categories like snacking or supplementary nutrition and markets like the U.S. AI helps in that regard, especially with the volume of big data available.

Pearmine relates, “The first goal is to understand within those millions, tens of millions, at times hundreds of millions of conversations people are having online, what are they talking about? Once we understand that, the second job is then to use our technology to look at how those conversations are going to affect purchase behavior and perception around our category up to three years into the future. Once we’ve achieved that, the third job is then to understand which of those opportunities are right for that portfolio, and then how can we move through a process to accelerate bringing products to market.”

For Glanbia, says Pearmine, “We’re going to look at supplements in the U.S. over the last two years. There’s almost seven million different unique conversations people have had on the platforms. Within those seven million conversations, there’s nearly twelve and a half thousand individual topics. We call them topics deliberately, not trends. Those topics are defined by ingredients, benefits, products, brands, occasions, emotions, and so on, that people are making reference to in the content of their Instagram posts, their tweets, their Pinterest, posts, etc.”

So how do we take those seven million conversations, twelve and a half thousand different topics, and identify what are people talking about? How do we project that to influence category behavior, by predominantly purchase behavior and perception into the future?

Pearmine notes, “A lot of the time, the questions posed to us by clients is, well, how do I use you? What use cases is it appropriate for me to consider social data for? And in simple form, the questions that we ask as marketers, as researchers of our agencies, of our partners, of consumers is exactly the same questions we’ve been asking for the last hundred years. But we help identify where social data should be a primary methodology versus a supplementary one and then how it sits within sort of the broader ecosystem of methodologies.”

Identifying the Key Trends

For Glanbia’s Ng, using Black Swan Data gives her the ability to scan the big trends in the space, identify the future pockets of growth, and refine and prioritize at the granular level to make the innovation relevant to today’s consumers. This brings new products to the world of innovation, the big trends within the space.

Ng says, “What we are seeing is big trends within the supplementary datasets. At GPN, we primarily serve in the health and wellness space. Monitoring these datasets is pretty spot on. But depending on the industry category you are serving, Black Swan Data offers multiple datasets. You can mix and match the datasets you want to monitor continuously. Now what we are seeing is, basically, each trend depicted as a bubble, and the size of the bubble is based on the volume of the conversation that is happening on the social platform. We can understand which one is the scale. And then the location is depicted by the past growth of such conversation and the predicted future growth of such conversation. We can understand where the future pockets of growth are, based on the social, volume and the velocity of the social conversation and social prediction.”

GPN can also see the sub-trends bubbling up underneath. For example, from consumable beauty it can be seen to be supporting the growth of hair, skin, and nails. In protecting healing, it is more about supporting and boosting your immunity and anti-inflammatory needs. The company can double click further to see the individual topics.

While it’s a substantial undertaking, it’s about uncovering these specific layers of research. “We are able to then identify every single ingredient, benefit, claim, product, brand that has an association with those spaces,” says Pearmine.

He adds, “We understand the trend life cycle. Each of these individual, red dots represents one of the hundreds or thousands of different ingredients or products that are being discussed within the context of this particular trend, we’re able to then understand which maturity phase that particular topic is in today and its forecasted growth then over the next twelve to thirty six months, depending on if it’s a more breakthrough or incremental innovation opportunity.”

Ng points out, “Paying attention to emerging adoption cycles or growing adoption cycles would be the way to go to consider the innovation for the next period of time. Take colostrum, for example, or especially bovine colostrum. It’s the first milk that mother cows produce for several days after giving birth. For the baby cows, to adapt to the new world coming out of the mother’s wombs, they need a little bit of a nutrition boost for their health and immunity protection. The mother cow’s fast milk is designed to be very nutrient rich, packed with unique protein, fats, antibodies, bioactive compounds, growth factors, and so on. It’s basically a super food and it caught the attention within the health and wellness space and the word spread.”

“Primarily, we can see that the category is a good fit when it comes to organizational capability, portfolio fits, brand fits, and so on,” notes Ng. “Hence, we pay attention to colostrum as one of the viable options. But depending on the category industry you are serving, you might pay attention to another trend as a viable option. Your mileage may vary, but it gives you an idea how this can be powerfully utilized for the innovation process. With that said, we introduced Isopure colostrum powder supplements, which was launched a few months ago.”

Ng concludes, “Black Swan Data helps us innovate with speed and better conviction. Because it turns the millions of consumer conversation into consumer insights, consumer foresight, evidence-based narrative that helps us to activate and back up why this innovation in the development will drive the consumer relevance in the markets we are serving, not only for today, but also for tomorrow.”

For more of the Glanbia Performance Nutrition product innovation case studies in partnership with Black Swan Data, watch the full presentation in the video from TMRE 2024.

Integrating AI-Enabled Insights to Guide Innovation

An unwrapped Hershey's chocolate bar.

Guiding Innovation

New innovations drive revenue, and corporations always need to develop fuller innovation pipelines. With consumers at the center of the innovation process, it’s become more important than ever to leverage the big data at our fingertips. That’s where sound research principles also come into play.

In addition to the foundations of quant and qual research, AI can provide opportunities to innovate as well. Joyce identifies several avenues that companies can capitalize on with AI processes and systems to employ for improving new product development:

  1. Ideation and Mapping
  2. Concept Development
  3. Refine Execution
  4. Testing and Validation

AI Inspiration

For Hershey’s Beacher, leveraging AI as a tool for innovation can support new product innovations for the diverse range of brands The Hershey Company offers, whether that be new products, new flavors, new cultural needs or preferences, new snacking categories and the like.

“Can AI come up with new products?” asks Beacher, pointing to the ways AI can find different brand identities and brand opportunities, from generic brands and underserved palettes to identifying which brands or which niche category a product might fit.

AI was able to help Hershey teams develop new opportunities with different flavor profiles, product adjacencies, frozen desserts, and salty snacks, for example, points out Beacher.

“AI really inspired our imagination—and stretched our thinking. It also enhanced how we are communicating,” says Beacher, pointing to how AI was able to capture the excitement of the ideas being presented to various brand, management and marketing teams.

Beacher notes that AI-enabled insights helped the company connect the dots, so to speak, identify cultural trends, and innovate faster and more efficiently. “It was five weeks instead of five months,” she says.

Further, AI-driven initiatives, with human oversight, also maintained a rigorous, quantifiable approach with rich consumer data, and a storytelling narrative, creating a robust framework for future research and development practices.

While AI is still in the early stages and faces challenges, such as legal hurdles and data security issues, Beacher notes that AI was key to inspire both insights and innovation.

“You still need to have parameters, go-to-market feasibility and model constraints,” notes Beacher, pointing out that concept validation and consumer feedback are still key pathways to success.

Still, the upside of AI-enabled insights driving the innovation discovery and journey process are robust while reducing time and complexity. “There are pipeline innovations, merger and acquisition opportunities, partnerships, it really expands our reach,” says Beacher. “It really helps us stay on the pulse of the consumer.”

Check out the video for the full fireside chat presented by ZS and The Hershey Company at TMRE 2024.

Shift Retail Lab Brings Together Insights & Innovation

A black woman engineering student in a lab with robotics.

Innovation is a key focus of VCU, and its Da Vinci Center, which is focused on product development and product innovation. Experimentation is also in keeping with these themes, and that’s where the Shift Retail Lab comes into play.

“Shift Lab was this experiment that we ran when thinking about how little had changed in American higher education when it comes to this space,” says Westlake. “We had this idea, what if you built a real-life lab to conduct that kind of work? That’s what we did with Shift Retail Lab. It started with this initial idea for a student storefront, and then transformed into this retail laboratory.”

He adds, “What this looks like is that students and our corporate partners are putting real products on the shelf. We’re engaging customers and doing tactile hands-on interaction with products, and the students are learning both how to do that work, and then we’re also providing that as a service for our corporate partners. Students have the ability to actually sell their products and services out of this space, and they keep 100% of the proceeds.”

Consumer feedback is key to the process, as participants gain insights and develop further iterations of their products.

Westlake notes, “The original impetus for this was how do we create a more dynamic learning space where we can bring our corporate partners? For example, we’ve been doing projects for Pfizer for the last ten years. We’ve done 15 industry sponsored products for Pfizer. Four of them wound up on the shelf. And it’s a space like this that we felt was key to do some of that early-stage testing. We’ve been able to serve hundreds of startups and early-stage ventures through this space, as well as corporate partners. And we’ve had thousands of people come through the door.”

The physical space of retail, such as pop-up shops, for example, is showing a revival as a counterpoint to the growth of ecommerce.

“What we’re seeing is this blending of themes. People still want to see, touch, and taste things before they invest in them on Kickstarter, before they invest in them as an angel or VC or somewhere later down the road,” he says. “This space has become that early-stage testing ground.”

He adds, “We quickly realized there was a huge gap in the marketplace for this type of storefront that can be built to turn over quickly. We worked with a designer to build the space as a black box theater. From the start, the space was designed to be flipped over instantaneously so that we can do entire takeovers of the space. And an interesting insight we had as well was that it’s helped a lot of our underrepresented founders secure funding that they weren’t able to do on their own. How cool is it to see people engaging with your product in the real world?”

Insights derived from the product development and feedback the students gain can be translated back to corporate partners and their design efforts.

Westlake continues, “You hear things like, Shift helps me to find my brand voice. We see people continue to try out different variations of their products and services while they’re in the space. It’s led to some interesting pivots along the way. I think that both from an educational perspective, from a teaching perspective, this allows us to teach product in an entirely different way, where you can literally be told by a partner, hey, we want you to run this, put this on the shelf, identify who our target market is, invite them into the space, incentivize them, collect their user feedback, and then give us those insights back in a way that is actionable.”

Watch the video featuring Dr. Westlake’s presentation of the Shift Retail Lab from TMRE 2024.

Leveraging Insights to Reach Innovation

A digital-like button that says "Start."

Download the Future of Insights Report

The panel at TMRE was moderated by Seth Adler, Head of IMI Media at All Things Insights, and included: Bart Borkosky, Chief Research Officer at OvationMR; Paul Coxhill, President at LIONS Insight/WARC; Maury Giles, SVP, Growth at Material; Kerry Sette, Vice President, Head of Consumer Insights & Research at Voya Financial; and Oksana Sobol, Vice President of Insights at The Clorox Company.

The advancements in artificial intelligence have brought with it newfound challenges and opportunities in the insights and innovation fields. The discipline is exploring new tools and technologies, such as synthetic data, developing best practices when using AI and creating industry use cases. At the same time, there is a counterpoint developing, to continue to focus insights on human-centricity, with human insights and understanding the voice of the consumer primary concerns.

The Future of Decision-Making

Just what will the future hold when it comes to insights? As our panelists indicated, it’s a complex question with many facets and perspectives associated with it.

For Clorox’s Oksana Sobol, the future of insights will be one that is faster, leaner, and focused on data and technology. There will also be what she terms a “growth imperative.” Organizations will focus on deliverable results, growth ideas and actionable insights.

Kerry Sette of Voya Financial sees a future where there is efficiency as propelled by technology such as artificial intelligence, while there will also be transformation. There will be new questions formed that will center on solving business challenges. There won’t just be strategy, but activation of insights will be a primary concern, as well as the inspiration and creativity of humans that will be ignited by emerging technologies.

Harnessing AI, panelists agreed, will be key in the future. As Sette suggests, we are still in a “crawl, walk, run” mode when it comes to upskilling teams. But this will lead to a deeper understanding of customers, and more of a focus on activation within the business.

Material’s Maury Giles also points to solutions that are actionable. He is seeing more of an integration at the agency and corporate level, where cross-disciplinary functions will be the key to developing teams.

“What are we solving for?” asks Giles. “Who makes the decision? True insights will be solutions that are actionable.”

Paul Coxhill of LIONS Insight/WARC looks at how process could play a key role in the future development of insights. Once the layers of structure and technology are in place, “work out the process, work out the team, to reflect what you are serving,” suggests Coxhill.

Speaking of structure and process, OvationMR’s Bart Borkosky looks at the way AI is building tools on both an internal and external level. But it still needs to solve a specific problem. “There needs to be intentional purpose, creativity and curiosity,” he says.

The Focus on Experimentation

How you use AI, our panelists agreed, will be of prime importance in the future. But one must not overlook quality as well as storytelling. Overall, it’s the combination of human and machine that will combine for successful growth.

Use cases will continue to become prevalent, and with it the ideation of insights and innovation, suggests Sobol. “It’s how do we integrate your business knowledge?” she says, pointing to examples of experimentation with synthetic data, for example.

AI may be efficient, says Giles, but it’s the human capacity that will be key to oversight of technology and keeping to sound behavioral and scientific principles. “How will humans make these decisions?” asks Giles. It’s humans that will be core to these business relationships going forward, adds Giles.

It’s that intersection between ideation, human and machine intelligence, where it’s all about creativity—and humans can’t be replaced in that regard, asserts Sette.

The human factor, Borkosky agrees, will be key to business collaboration and relationships. “More than ever, we have to be curious,” he says.

Overall, our panel was optimistic about the future of insights, and the marriage of both AI and human intelligence. “AI won’t set strategy,” says Sobol. “Humans will still be relevant to decision-making.”

Editor’s Note: Check out the video from TMRE 2024 for more on the Future of Insights panel. In addition, for a more in-depth look at the Future of Insights Report, check out All Things Insights’ October story, “Exploring the Evolution of Insights.” The Future of Insights Report is also available to view or download by visiting the insights community, AllThingsInsights.com.

Download the Future of Insights Report

Inspiring The Future of Innovation

A big road sign that says The Future is Now.

From the latest about the delicate balance between artificial intelligence and human insights, to more specific themes about leadership, culture and teams, to diving deep into topics like product innovation, brand health tracking, synthetic data and AI-enhanced qualitative research, TMRE didn’t disappoint.

Navigating Change

With Proctor & Gamble celebrating 100 years of driving consumer experiences through insights, it seemed fitting to kick off TMRE with Kirti Singh, Chief Analytics, Insights & Media Officer at P&G, speaking about, “A Century of Curiosity: P&G Analytics & Insights Discovering the Future.”

As Singh looked at the company’s insights-rich history, one couldn’t help but be inspired by this “century of curiosity,” filled by brands like Bounty, Dawn and Tide and the many product innovations the company has inspired. But it was really the changing role of insights through the decades that helped bring those consumer-centric brands and those superior brand experiences to life for consumers.

“Insights have become genuine partners driving growth,” says Singh.

To bring humans, data, and technology together for 100 years is no small feat. But it’s what makes transformational improvements possible and gives researchers the power to transform. As for what makes a brand consumer centric, Singh brought up a few key points to leverage:

  1. Leadership Intent (winning hearts and minds)
  2. Curiosity Mindset (having a learning mindset)
  3. Business Acumen (consumer-centricity as a business strategy)

Slices of Insights Inspiration

If Singh set the stage for the first day of TMRE, Stefania Gvillo, SVP, Chief Analytics & Insights Officer at Domino’s Pizza, served up a few slices of wisdom, insights and inspiration to close the first day of the conference.

In the keynote, “Insights & Influence Ignited: Leadership, Impact & The Art of Storytelling,” Gvillo examined the impact of storytelling, curated learning, insights leadership through purpose and authenticity, and her experiences as a strategic partner at Domino’s. Gvillo made a few key storytelling points that could serve anyone in the insights and innovation communities looking to create impactful stories:

  1. Be a Journalist (not a novelist). Keep it simple and concise, remember the audience, and balance context with the message.
  2. Know Your Audience. Craft stories, build trust and connect and cater to different audiences. Focus on the consumer experience.
  3. Evoke Emotion. Create relevancy.
  4. Ignite Action. This leads to what and why to what’s next? This is your call to action and recommendation.
  5. Embrace Technology. Create inspired solutions.

Data storytelling and forming end-to-end partnerships is also important, to turn insights to action, says Gvillo. “How do you close the loop?” she asks. “Are you invited to the table with an active role? It’s the collaborative methodology that sets us apart to drive action. Be a change agent.”

Ultimately, “we are all influencers honing that actionable message,” says Gvillo. But by building a learning culture, experimenting, and staying relevant we can learn fast and stay ahead of trends.

Becoming A Choice Architect

While Gvillo fired up the TMRE crowd with her storytelling, Katy Milkman took the main stage the next day to provide a little bit of wisdom and wit behind what’s known as choice architecture, which is the ways in which we can influence decisions as businesses and as individuals. Milkman is an economist, bestselling author and professor at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Her keynote, “Influencing Decisions Through Choice Architecture,” examined ways in which a choice is presented (on screens and in person), which can create an extremely valuable tool for improving employee outcomes and consumer choices as well as innovation and new product development. This science of “choiceology” can help identify consumer needs and wants and nudge consumers to make better choices. The way the environment is constructed can also help steer consumers into making better choices and improving decision making. Milkman presented a set of points that can help improve those decisions:

  1. Set Helpful Defaults (the path of least resistance)
  2. Prompt People to Plan (and to follow through)
  3. Leverage Social Norms (reasonable choices)
  4. Timing Principles (the power of timing)

In these ways, as choice architects we can influence behavior, encourage consumers to have more fresh start moments, reduce obstacles to change and drive better solutions.

Creating the Next Hit Product

As Milkman provided a fascinating look at making better choices, the closing keynote that day from Derek Thompson gave a just as compelling examination into a different avenue of consumer choice—how some products become mega hits while others do not.

In “The Anatomy of Viral Trends & Hit Products,” Thompson, host of Plain English, bestselling author of Hit Makers and On Work, staff writer at The Atlantic, presented an interesting look at how consumers liking new things, and the success of such products, is actually a myth of modernity. In other words, people prefer the power of familiarity. This in essence influences human discovery and human innovation, among other factors, creating a formula of familiarity yet also still one of surprise.

Thompson brought up these principles from his book, “Hit Makers,” that in terms of new products, consumers tend to gravitate towards MAYA (Most Advanced Yet Acceptable) designs. The MAYA principle suggests that the ideal design is a balance between what’s familiar and what’s novel. If a design is too unfamiliar, customers may tune it out, and if it’s too familiar, they may look past it.

“There is a love of new things, yet a fear of new things and design is at the intersection, where we can combine the new and the familiar,” says Thompson. “Make your product surprising yet familiar.”

Thompson further asks product designers, “Where are you on the surprise/familiarity spectrum?” Yet, despite this spectrum of the familiar, Thompson suggests that the surprise element still gives us room in life and business for art, bravery, risks and experimentation.

Do You Speak My Language?

Charles Duhigg, New York Times bestselling author and Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist at The New York Times Magazine, closed out TMRE with a keynote on “Supercommunicators—The Power of Conversation and Hidden Language of Connection.” Duhigg presented an insightful exploration of why some conversations succeed while others fail. How does communication work within our brains, our families, our workplaces, and our communities?

As we go about our lives, we often mistakenly identify practical, emotional and social conversations. Sometimes we recognize these types of conversations, but other times we don’t. Duhigg makes the case that we can better understand our communications and connect with others when we can match the right conversations.

There is a method of active surveillance and heightened emotional intelligence that we can achieve within our own conversations to take them to the next level, notes Duhigg.

Some of this art of conversation might have to do with the types of questions that we ask others in both business and in life. We are also influenced by how we listen and how we show conversational empathy with others. This can lead to reciprocal authenticity as we make genuine connections with others with the conversations and stories that we tell and share.

All of the TMRE keynotes provided a window into the skills, culture and leadership of the insights professional. But innovation professionals and all manner of businesspeople can be inspired by these lessons to take action in their careers. And as the keynotes showed, it seems that the art of storytelling, in any profession, is indeed a skill worth learning, telling, and sharing with others as we communicate our own unique stories.

Editor’s Note: A version of this story first appeared on All Things Insights. The next TMRE will take place October 28-30, 2025, at the Paris Las Vegas Hotel in Las Vegas, NV.

Leading Innovation Through Change

A welder with helmet welding steel, with smoke, heat and sparks.

Blending AI with Human Intelligence

There are many lessons that the innovation community can also learn from their market research peers. While there was much trepidation, and cautious optimism, at TMRE 2023 regarding AI, this past year saw a change in perspective as the community seemed encouraged and positive about this powerful market research tool and how it can amplify their efforts in insights, innovation and new product development. Embracing change in the industry or combating broader market forces such as inflation, harnessing AI with human oversight, and enhancing leadership skills were all prevalent themes.

The session, “How AI & Digital Transformation are Redefining Consumer Behavior,” served as an important reminder that the principle of “adapt or fall behind” is accelerating as AI grows in the marketplace and companies invest in digital transformation efforts to rapidly strive to keep pace. As we know, digital transformation is a key innovation imperative as well.

As always, the digital age is empowered by an evolving consumer. “Consumers are more informed, connected and digitally empowered than ever before,” says Katy Emerson, EVP, Customer Success at Suzy, who held the session along with her colleague, Mary Lois Smith, Senior Director, Market Research at Suzy.

While AI still needs a human touch, the technology is bringing immediacy and responsiveness to the market, creating a dynamic two-way relationship, noted Suzy’s executives. Consumer expectations and interactions are going beyond traditional models as they expect more customization and personalization in their alignment with brands today. For the innovation professional, it’s all about adaptation as they identify practical applications of AI while pinpointing consumer preferences.

Still, with the acknowledgement of AI’s advantages, there is the key of human oversight that’s needed, and to bring humanity and all its benefits to research and innovation. Knowing that humanity is first and foremost the priority, means knowing your consumer, their mindset and values. This in turn can be leveraged in innovation efforts with newly developed products and services.

The panel, “How to Keep Humanity at the Core of Market Research,” served as fuel for thinking that even in an age of advancing technology and data-driven insights, it’s crucial to remember the human element, especially through the lens of consumer insights.

Moderated by Casey Mohan, VP, Qualitative Insights & Strategy at CMB, the panel included Jessica Lilie, Vice President, Research, Insights and Analytics at Sutter Health; Teresa Correa-Pavlat, Consumer, Business, Insights & Analytics Lead, Brand & Incubator at Haleon; and Alan Moskowitz, Vice President of Consumer Insights at C Space.

Ultimately, market research, and through it the innovation initiatives that could result from insights collaboration, is still about “understanding the emotion of real people,” notes Moskowitz, who adds, “Market research needs to be human centered, intentional and prioritizing people.” Regardless of the tools used, such as AI, keeping the human first and our curiosity at the forefront will add value and brand relevancy to the insights and innovation mission.

Strengthening Brand Health for Innovation

While AI was a prevalent topic of sessions and conversations at TMRE 2024, there was also a healthy dose of other themes on the executive’s table. Highlighted at several sessions was the concept of brand health tracking. This could also benefit innovation efforts when it comes to brand and new product development.

This category seems to have been energized with the growth and advantages of AI and the introduction of new marketing tools, which has made brand health tracking easier and less of a chore, measured by more recognizable key performance indicators with the result that more dynamic action can be taken.

In the session, “Tracking Mental Availability & Advantages with Organic Valley,” the food brand teamed up with Quantilope to introduce a new approach to dynamic brand health tracking based on recent work from Professor Jenni Romaniuk and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. This new approach focuses on category entry points, mental availability, and mental advantages. The session was held by Organic Valley’s Senior Director of Consumer Strategy, Tripp Hughes, and Quantilope’s Senior Solutions Consultant, Gianna Saladino.

In the case study, Organic Valley was able to monitor its brands and the product categories as a whole and understand how the brands grow, how to measure brand health, and how to increase the mental availability of the brands for consumers. Overall, the new brand tracking gave Organic Valley new frameworks and new avenues to build wider, fresher networks, increase category entry points and increase mental availability. This further gave the brand more actionable insights, plus ways to evaluate advertising and measure quality of marketing, all key points to leverage innovation and research and development efforts as well.

Through the brand health tracking, Organic Valley was able to compare different entry categories, such as milk versus cheese, breakfast versus snacks and taste versus experience, for example.

“It’s really a new way to think of the consumer and build strategy,” says Hughes. He adds, “Unlike traditional brand tracking, we were able to play and compare across different categories, and better identify core consumer drivers. You have to understand both your higher and lower level brand drivers. These metrics can impact decision makers, as well as marketing, brand activation, innovation and identify areas of growth.”

Other sessions at TMRE that focused on brand tracking tactics included, “Just-Right Brand Tracking for Bob’s Discount Furniture,” with Brendan Baby, VP Insights and Analytics at Bob’s Discount Furniture, and Lauren Deraleau, Head of Research at Glass. They discussed how to build a strong brand tracking program—one that was robust, reliable, tailored to their specific business and needs as well as affordable.

“We were building the insights capability and looking at how to integrate and activate a brand tracking program,” says Baby, pointing out that it has to deliver value, be customizable and ultimately deliver business impact through a framework for brand measurement.

An additional session, “Using Discover’s Brand Health Tracker to Expand Brand Image and Drive Growth,” also explored the topic and how new processes can take you beyond just tracking to drive marketing, strategic and foundational improvements, and integrate multiple products such as what innovation might provide. The session was held by Paula Chona, Senior Principal, Consumer Insights at Discover Financial Services.

“Brand health tracking can identify new opportunities and can guide future product strategy, as well as be part of a multi-pronged research approach,” notes Chona. “An enhanced brand health tracking program really sparked a mixed methodology of quant, qual and vendor measurements—all these tools working together.”

Igniting Innovation Through Enhanced Qual Research

Speaking of qualitative research, several sessions in part focused on how qualitative methods, which are often viewed as a bit slower moving and cumbersome, are igniting a renewal as researchers leverage AI to enhance this key research tool for both vendors and client-side parties.

In the presentation, “Fruit of the Loom Case Study: Spinning Qual Feedback into Insights Gold,” Chad Holleman, Senior Director of Consumer Insights at Fruit of the Loom, discussed a new program taking place in partnership with Canvs AI.

While qualitative feedback is a rich source for empathetic consumer insights, the inefficiency and complexity of analysis lead many research teams to approach qual with trepidation. Holleman shared how AI is being stitched into the fabric of consumer insights at Fruit of the Loom, automating mundane tasks and empowering focus on weaving compelling, evidence-based stories. Indeed, Holleman points out, AI-programs like the one through Canvs can help with text analysis, enhance empathy, support storytelling and ramp up speed of insights to impact the business, including in innovation of new products.

“It really accelerated the business impact and empowered us to take qual to the next level,” says Holleman. “The program elevated the customer voice and increased the impact of our insights. AI investments will make us that much better, strengthening and improving partnerships and collaborations, as well as democratize the data across the organization.”

In a similar vein, the session, “Blending Brains and Bots: Strategically Leveraging AI and Human Insights in Qualitative Research,” presented by Kendall Nash, SVP at Burke, also looked at how qual is being energized by AI, with some human insights and oversight in the mix as well.

While using AI to conduct and speed qualitative interviews, both in text and voice, is still an imperfect science, progress is being made on many fronts. Nash points out, for example, that AI in qual can support the screening upfront, synthesize a range of tools and help with the data collection, assessment criteria and interviews.

Optimum qual research is often subjective, an honest and authentic conversation and discussion, and often needs to be put into context, identify nuances and understand relevant client goals. This is really where human skills come into play, says Nash, whereby we can gauge credibility or notice incongruencies in the narrative, developing deeper and authentic discussions.

Still, as Nash compared AI to human insights, it remains clear that a combination of both AI and human insights can help enhance qual research and enable progress on both the insights and innovation fronts.

AI-moderated versus human-moderated qualitative interviews may still present some advantages and disadvantages, but AI is quickly stepping up its game and skill sets. However, the qualitative researcher must provide contextual guidance, and often must adjust their approach to each individual in the study. Bots may not replace human moderators quite yet, Nash points out, but AI and human insights together can perhaps push qualitative research to new heights in terms of efficiency and storytelling.

With much of the conference focusing on both AI and human intelligence, as the insights community came together at TMRE to learn, converse and celebrate, the market research industry showed excitement, an embrace of change and resilience—and perhaps indicated that the full story of AI and HI has yet to be written. This should also bode well for innovation experts at the top of their field, as they look to leverage this new age of analytics in their research and development efforts.

Editor’s Note: A version of this story first appeared on All Things Insights. The next TMRE will take place October 28-30, 2025, at the Paris Las Vegas Hotel in Las Vegas, NV.

Top Innovation Themes from 2024

A gold pocket watch half buried in the sand.

While artificial intelligence is on the minds of many, data science is closely related. As the innovation community leverages new technologies such as AI and backs initiatives with data-driven approaches, look for this to continue into the new year. At the same time, there is recognition that human-centricity remains at the forefront of innovation’s focus, and creating and cultivating an innovative culture is another key path to getting the job done.

2024 Year in Review

•            Illuminating Innovation: A Review of Q1 2024

•            Sparking Innovation: A Review of Q2 2024

•            Cooking Up Innovation: A Review of Q3 2024

•            Building on Innovation Best Practices: A Review of Q4 2024

Top 5 Innovation Themes for 2024

Based on the Gemini analysis of the All Things Innovation blogs, the following are the top five innovation themes for 2024. These themes highlight the importance of technology, data, and human-centered design in driving innovation. By focusing on these areas, organizations can position themselves for long-term success.

1. Data-Driven Innovation: Leveraging data and analytics to inform decision-making, optimize processes, and drive innovation. By harnessing the power of data, organizations can gain valuable insights, identify emerging trends, and make data-driven decisions that lead to improved outcomes.

2. AI and Machine Learning: Utilizing AI and ML to automate tasks, improve decision-making, and develop innovative products and services. AI and ML can be used to analyze large datasets, identify patterns, and make predictions, enabling organizations to gain a competitive advantage.

3. Innovation Culture: Fostering a culture of innovation, experimentation, and risk-taking. A strong innovation culture is essential for encouraging creativity, collaboration, and a willingness to embrace change. By empowering employees and creating a supportive environment, organizations can unlock their full innovation potential.

4. Customer Centricity: Understanding and meeting customer needs to drive product development, marketing strategies, and customer experience. By putting the customer at the center of their business, organizations can build stronger customer relationships, increase customer satisfaction, and drive loyalty.

5. Emerging Technologies: Exploring the potential of emerging technologies like blockchain, IoT, and virtual/augmented reality to drive innovation. Staying abreast of emerging technologies can help organizations identify new opportunities and stay ahead of the competition.

Top 10 Most Viewed Stories on All Things Innovation

Finally, we turned to Google Analytics to reveal just what content our innovation community gravitated towards throughout the year. The ten most popular stories on All Things Innovation in 2024 were:

  1. The Benefits of Innovative Entrepreneurship
  2. FEI 2024 Post-Show Report
  3. FEI 2024 Brochure & Innovation Perspectives Report
  4. The Impact of AI on Innovation
  5. Fractional Work: The Growth of Flexibility and Innovation
  6. H1 2024 Insights & Innovation Outlook Report
  7. Transform New Product Development with AI
  8. Innovation 2024
  9. The Future of Work is Reshaping Trends in Innovation
  10. Applying AI to Anthropological Research

Video courtesy of Strategyzer