Creating and Filling a Sustainable New Product Pipeline
Issue: $70M Consumer Packaged Goods business urgently needed a new product development process and pipeline to meet growth targets, and to quickly and regularly satisfy a major customer’s demand for “new news.”
Situation
With an over-extended marketing team, business lacked available internal resources to create and fill new product pipeline.
Actions
- Created new product development process which incorporated needs and constraints of business.
- Identified way to incorporate all previously identified new product ideas into process.
- Created an ongoing Innovation Team, responsible for being the group’s innovation “brain trust”.
- Team tasked with developing an ongoing familiarity with food trends by utilizing readily available”leading edge indicators” such as the Food Network, food magazines, and gourmet food trends.
- Created worksheet for monitoring and tracking trends.
- Recommended ethnographic research to fill in gaps in consumer understanding.
- Assisted in supplier sourcing.
- Participated in ethnographic research.
- Created pre-work assignments for Brainstorming session.
- Created template for testing ideas using Tournament Testing methodology.
Solutions
- GM of division attributes all of division’s $15M in revenue growth in 2007 to Argentum Strategy Group’s work on this project.
- Client pipeline is filled with enough early, middle and late-stage ideas to last them at least 2-3 years.
- Research identified 55 new, promising, consumer-approved ideas, 17 of which are moving into in-depth concept testing.