A cost of living crisis is not the time to stop investing in innovation – part three
A cost of living crisis provides an OPPORTUNITY to generate successful innovation.*
*Optimize your innovation and thrive in an inflationary environment and beyond.
So far in our cost of living blog series, we’ve explained how Catalyx can maximize the success of your product portfolio and help you to discover how to drive consumer engagement.
This week, we’re focusing on why you should be optimizing your innovation right now.
Innovating with success is a challenge at ANY time.
Despite millions being spent on research, 95% of innovations fail.
Despite that, a cost of living crisis is not the time to stop investing in innovation – and here’s why…
Consumers are, understandably, more critical in their decision making during a pricing crisis.
So, at a time when the small shifts don’t make an impact, you’ll have the opportunity to push your future innovations to more creative and relevant transformations by bringing the consumer into your innovation process right now.
Pricing comes into laser sharp focus with consumers making smarter choices on benefit and relevance during economically challenging times, so brands need to differentiate in significant ways to maintain or grow their position in market.
And this is where innovation comes in…
Innovation that meets consumers’ needs in completely new and powerful ways will win not just in times of crisis but will also help shape the future.
Putting consumers at the heart of your innovation to drive and optimize, will ensure your future product taps into the hearts of your consumers.
At Catalyx, our award-winning Consumer Activation System has all the tools to enable you to optimize your product innovation. For instance:
Rank and Enhance (focused)
Have you got numerous early-stage concept ideas? Before you whittle them down, you want a consumer check to ensure your innovation won’t fail in a tough economic environment where consumers are making hard choices about where to spend their money. You want a quick check for which ones rank higher and how to enhance them to better meet consumer need. Well, use our Rank and Enhance (focused) tool.
Rank and Enhance (complete)
You’ve crafted concepts but you need to ensure you have consumer input to rank against purchase drivers – and you need to know how to enhance them to better meet consumer need in this inflationary environment. Consumer input at this stage is important to prevent your innovation failing and give you the direction for success in an environment where consumers are making tough choices about what to spend their money on. Here’s where our Rank and Enhance (complete) helps.
Evolve and Elevate
Input your consumer voice into early-stage concepts to evolve and elevate them into transformational innovation, so that you can win with consumers against the cheaper competition and shape the future. The Catalyx Evolve and Elevate will do just that with your consumers. It will provide a deep dive into knowing how and why they should be evolved to maximize your success.
Iterative Concept Builder
Consumers are making smart choices about product purchases, so what you put into the market needs to meet consumer needs and expectations that will make them choose product over price. Build your product innovation with your consumers, so every element of your product – from benefit to execution – is delivering on relevance. The Catalyx Iterative Concept Builder is designed to put your consumer at the heart of the innovation process through an iterative process to end up with the most successful combination of concept elements. Find out how this comes to life.
Behavioural Concept Test
In an inflationary environment where consumers’ behaviour is changing based on smart choices about what to prioritise spending money on and where to cut costs, behavioural testing can play a crucial role to have confidence in purchase intent. Using our Behavioural Concept Test will enable you to go beyond claimed response and check your product wins against the competition in a real life-like setting. Discover how the Catalyx Behavioural Concept Test can help you to unlock your crowd.
Behavioural Pricing Test
Pricing at purchase is a huge contention for brands, retailers and consumers in this inflationary market. We’re seeing pricing wars between brands and retailers in some markets. We know consumers are increasingly looking for the cheapest prices of products they need. Therefore, behaviourally testing your pricing changes before launching them in-market will enable you to know if you can still win against the competition with the price changes. Use our Catalyx Behavioural Pricing Test to do this in a real life-like setting for the confidence that you’ll still win in market.
To conclude, we hope that following our cost of living blog series has shown you that, even in the toughest of markets or economies, it is possible to unlock growth for your brand with the help of Catalyx systemized approach using our award-winning smart technology and our sparky, curious people.
Let us show you how you can maximize, discover and optimize your brand offering today. Contact the Catalyx team to discover how we can help you to grow even in the most challenging markets.