Though we’re often told to leave the past behind, it’s sometimes very profitable to revisit it, as several sessions I attended at The Market Research Event in October made clear. I imagine the theme was unintentional, coming as it did across a wide spectrum of unrelated talks, but a presentation from researchers at Sargento Foods stood out as an exemplar of the value of being able to access and explore previous research, not just to avoid repeat expenditures of time and money but also to learn from earlier efforts, to mine findings that may once have been viewed as just so much rubble but may contain valuable jewels.
The act of looking back generally runs counter to the idea of innovation, a main quality of which is newness. If you innovate, you produce or do something that the world hasn’t seen before. While many innovations are wholly new, countless others are iterations or advancements of previous ideas. For some reason, we generally seem to assign more value to the wholly-new, as if its pristine provenance somehow makes it more worthy than the iteration-born product or idea, which has never made sense to me.
In their presentation, Sargento researchers Michelle Monkoski and Barbara Kilcoyne explored how the company’s successful Balanced Breaks product grew out of its earlier learning for the similar Cheese Medleys product. The company had developed Cheese Medleys, which mixed cheese, fruit and nuts in one package, in 2004 in response to consumers’ growing interest in healthier, more wholesome foods. Cheese Medleys didn’t meet the needed hurdles, the researchers said, so the product wasn’t rolled out but the company kept its eye on the healthier-eating trend.
In 2004, the language around nutrition was more about cutting out, about the absence of certain things in food, namely calories and fat. Fast-forward to 2012 and the language and thinking around healthier eating and snacking had changed to focus on what was present in the foods – quality, simple, wholesome ingredients. And instead of cutting out, there was a striving toward moderation or balance. Gradually, the ideas behind Balanced Breaks – refrigerated, single-serve snacks combining portions of cheese, fruit and nuts in separate sections of packaging – took shape.
Another welcome change in perception was a shift in consumer thinking about refrigeration and snacks. In 2004, it had seemed like a barrier – who would think of looking for snacks in the refrigerated section? But by 2012, refrigeration was found to confer a welcome benefit – freshness – that was perfectly in line with consumer preferences.
Through the work on Balanced Breaks, the researchers said they learned the value of not being afraid to reexamine ideas or concepts that were once deemed non-starters. In the Q&A session afterwards, an audience member asked how they were able to get leadership behind them to take another shot at the cheese/nuts/fruit concept. While acknowledging that there had been a change of leadership in the interim between Cheese Medleys and Balanced Breaks, they said their insights function’s demonstrated history of monitoring trends and presenting findings internally gave them the credibility they needed among important audiences to build a convincing case for moving forward with Balanced Breaks once their research showed that consumer thinking had shifted in the product’s favor.
The company also benefited from its commitment to looking beyond the traditional food categories in which it operates, they said. Customer immersion efforts, along with its annual Trendscape event, in which internal and external subject-matter experts are brought in for a day of exploration, kept it in touch with consumer needs and also broadened thinking about possible new products – even those that might be based on ideas that failed to fly in the past.