Successful Innovation is Increasingly About Resolving Nuanced Trade-offs

The standard of consumer goods innovation has risen in the past 10-15 years. If you want to achieve scale without influencer hype and keep growing, you must understand category-specific trade-offs and resolve them with an excellent sensory experience. 

To get a real foothold, therefore, you need more than today’s hyper-trendy product attribute (e.g. keto, paleo, vegan, gluten-free, low-carb, etc.). You need to help consumers accomplish things like –

• Lower my sugar intake without artificial sweeteners and deliver a similar flavor experience.
• Give me a soap that enhances my skin feel with high-quality ingredients and no synthetic additives.
• Give me a high satiety, low-sugar bar without synthetic ingredients that I want to keep eating.
  
  

None of these innovation challenges are easy to pull off in terms of mainstream R&D. This is why today’s innovator is more and more likely going to need to look beyond the existing co-man ecosystem. 

The next wave of innovators needs to work even harder on their R&D to get into the market with something that awakens frustrated niches, the kind of niches that take weird things and make them cool to enormous audiences. 

Are you ready to hear more? Join me for the Q2 Riding the Ramp training on April 12. This webinar is for founders in the early years who are new to the CPG industry and the art of planning early-stage growth. (This event is for founders/owners only.)