"We partnered with Ideas To Go and their Creative Consumers® associates to help us identify motivating needs and desires...our concept testing success rate went from zero to 38%."
Recapture innovation mojo by focusing on what really matters.
BACKGROUND
After innovation launches over previous years struggled in the marketplace, the Quaker Chewy granola bar team needed to get back on track. The problem was not lack of ideas or process, but lack of structure around innovation strategy.
OBJECTIVE
Optimize Chewy granola bar concepts and get the brand’s innovation plan back on track.
RESULT
A consumer-benefit driven concept that led to a new positioning that created in-market performance that exceeded the target.
+ DETAILS
The Quaker Chewy team decided to identify and explore what really matters to their consumers—so their big ideas would get the attention they deserved.
To accomplish this goal, they approached Ideas To Go to optimize several granola bar concepts with appealing descriptions and compelling, single-minded benefits. The Quaker team came with open minds, ready to explore and solve the consumer problems. With the help of 15 Creative Consumers® associates, the ITG and Quaker team explored snacking insights, product-focused opportunity expansion questions and creative imagery to help develop meaningful positioning statements based on solving consumer problems. In the end, this process yielded Quaker Chewy’s first BASES Ready concept in years.
The winning product and positioning, Quaker Big Chewy Sweet & Salty Granola Bars, led to impressive in-market performance that mirrors the concept success, and exceeded targets.
Since then, the Quaker team has continued to focus on developing better concepts that revolve around consumer-based insights and benefits. As a result, they have narrowed the concepts they take to testing. By improving the concepts and halving the number tested, the Quaker team experienced a greater success rate, going from 0% to 38% passing concepts.
“We partnered with Ideas To Go and their Creative Consumers® associates to help us identify motivating needs and desires...our concept testing success rate went from zero to 38%. One thing I like to tell my team is, Ideas To Go—and I truly believe this—will make a concept as good as it can be.”
— Project leader Doug Healy, then Senior Manager of Innovation Architecture and Snacking at Quaker
In 2014, Doug shared his team's success story at The Market Research Event conference: