Three Ways Innovation Teams Are Using Data to Develop Future-Proofed CPG Brands

Innovation teams are tasked with a long list of responsibilities. From developing and validating concepts to executing multi-faceted innovation strategies, ongoing management of your organization’s new product pipeline rests squarely on your shoulders.

It’s a tall order, given that about 75% of new consumer product launches fail, according to Harvard Business Review. Choose the wrong category, the wrong opportunity, the wrong distribution or branding strategy, and you can waste time and money.

Let’s put that another way. Your organization could waste years and millions of dollars.

But here’s the good news: there is a solution.

Innovation leaders can now launch new brands with data-powered precision. From beginning to end, it’s possible to see emerging trends earlier, identify market whitespace by leveraging VOC data, and confidently predict where the market is headed.

All of this translates to less waste and — most importantly — navigating around iceberg-sized mistakes that can quickly sink brands in today’s fast-paced CPG landscape.

Top 3 Ways Innovation Teams Use Data to Grow Their CPG Brands

Keep reading to see exactly how innovation teams are using historical and predictive data to develop future-proofed CPG brands.

Use-Case #1: Validating New Concepts

Every innovation team is seeking the next item that consumers will obsess over.

Developing and validating a concept is a strategic struggle. It requires data-based evidence and compelling arguments. But this struggle becomes easier when teams have instant and user-friendly access to real-time data that provides specific insights into purchase criteria.

With access to comprehensive, real-time data, innovation teams can determine which trends are emerging, rather than trends that have already peaked.

The end result? Your brand goes to market before your competition with a data-backed product that consumers crave.

Helio puts this power at your fingertips. In three clicks, users can:

• Tap into the most comprehensive data. Identify emerging brands and trends in order to tease out trends faster than your competition. Get an instant snapshot of a brand’s revenue range, number of retail doors, online visitors, and social following.
• Leverage predictive sales metrics. Without Helio, innovation teams are just analyzing information that’s already in the hands of every competitor. But with Helio’s proprietary predictive analytics engine (Helio Growth Predictor), see exactly where future sales will originate at the brand, product and category level. Join our list of clients who are now able to project whether or not a brand might outperform its competitors.
• Identify whitespace for products, brands, and categories. With Helio’s KPC analytics, our clients are addressing market gaps, accelerating outcomes, and elevating the overall experience for current and potential customers.
• Engage and delight users and search engines at the same time. Helio’s TF IDF insights provide data-driven inspiration for concept development. Clients also enjoy a cross-functional byproduct as they leverage TF IDF data to identify targeted content strategies that strategically align with searched-for, emerging, and yet-to-be-satisfied consumer desires.

BONUS: With Helio, Reporting Has Never Been Easier

Innovation teams can seamlessly communicate and report insights about unmet demands to key stakeholders by exporting graphs to Excel. Then, further customize the data and combine it with existing information already stored in tools like Power BI or Tableau, and more.

Use-Case #2: Forecasting to Address Financial Hurdles and Mitigate Waste

Innovation teams stress about how much due diligence is enough in order to avoid pitching ideas with:

• Unforeseen financial hurdles
• Markets that aren’t large enough
• Undiscovered risks
• Overestimated size-of-prize numbers

Turning over every stone before making a massive monetary move is a huge responsibility.

Initiatives tank when competitors get to a hot opportunity before your brand does. But Helio makes it easy to search for a given attribute within a certain product, so you can decide if pursuing an idea makes financial sense and if you have enough time to be first to market.

Before going to the CEO or CFO with the next idea, innovation teams can lean on Helio to address financial hurdles and mitigate wasted effort and resources.

Helio clients:

• Leverage historical success and failure rates for new brands in specific categories. Using data captured for more than ten years, predict the likelihood of failure for brands operating in specific categories.
• Estimate the size of potential opportunities. One of the hardest nuts to crack is analyzing disruptive brands and quantifying them. Having Helio on your side means more confidence the next time the CFO wants to know whether this is a $5M or a $50M opportunity.
• Mitigate waste. Data-driven insights help to ensure your brand makes a move only in spaces where the opportunity and size of prize is worth the investment.

Use-Case #3: Launching New Brands with Data-Powered Precision

Until now, innovation teams have struggled with:

• Monitoring too many sources to uncover insights. Not having a central source of truth for what the consumer is saying about similar products makes launching new brands that much more difficult and time consuming.
• Truly accurate and actionable benchmarking. Data about product launches from competitors unlocks insight into where your product launch should be if it’s going to be successful.
• Budgeting for supply because forecasts were shooting in the dark. With Helio, you can elevate your launch process, supply estimates, and more by leveraging data-based forecasts and decisions.

When launching a new brand or product, distribution channel and retail mix are wildly important components. To strike the right balance, innovation teams must consider a wide array of pre- and post-launch data points and be able to extract insights about emerging trends in consumer preferences.

From analyzing brand attributes and tracking key purchase criteria to searching customer reviews and extracting insights from key performance metrics, designing a truly innovative pipeline begins with the most current and comprehensive data.

Data-powered precision requires granular-level data that deeply informs pipeline execution ideas and helps avoid overinvesting in the wrong launch strategy.

With Helio, innovation teams now have capabilities to:

• Predict future Nielsen sales, so you have early performance indicators — often months before POS data is available.
• Capture VOC from multiple sources, so you instantly get a holistic picture of how customers are perceiving your new innovation.
• Benchmark your launch against others in your category, so you can pulse-check if this launch is ‘super hot’ or ‘lukewarm at best’ and forge a path forward accordingly.
• Forecast first-year sales based on revenue and growth of other emerging brands in the space, so you set targets and demand predictors that are more realistic from the outset, thereby generating supply levels that make sense.

The Helio Difference

There are many CPG data platforms out there. But Helio is different.

Our clients leverage comprehensive data. Our clients leverage a truly holistic picture so they can make better-informed and more confident decisions. We pull from the broadest dataset in the emerging CPG space, which includes more than 1.5M brands and more than 200 sources.

Our clients operate ahead of the curve. We identify emerging brands and trends before they peak, so you go to market before your competition does.

We go beyond online metrics. Because we dig deeper and beyond the most commonly used data points, you access the universe of current digital, social, online, and offline sales performance data. With this holistic picture of performance, your analysis becomes predictive, so you create and effectively launch the most innovative ideas — and you launch them at exactly the right time.

Our capabilities scale with you. Different organizations have different needs at different points in the launch process. That’s why Helio’s features support a wide variety of industries, business models, desired outcomes, and actual outcomes.

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Developing innovative and future-proofed CPG brands means uncovering emerging trends and operating with a sharp focus on predictive analytics. Take action today so you can begin identifying future growth pockets and your innovation team can address unmet consumer needs in the most captivating, efficient, and profitable way.

Learn more by requesting a demo today.