Market Opportunities

The Challenge

A global FMCG company discovered a new “brain food”. They needed help to identify which of several uses was most promising and which food category would be best suited to enhance with it. If they knew people’s dissatisfaction with their cognitive abilities they could steer their costly research program into the right direction.

Our Approach

Traditional direct satisfaction questions on personal capabilities yield next to no useful insight because people learn to cope with their abilities and give distorted and flattened responses across sociodemographics.

Therefore, we asked for predictions of the satisfaction levels across gender and age segments in the USA, as a developed country, and in China, as a developing one. Participants had to take a step back which removed their biased frame of reference, delivering a rich and differentiated tapestry of emotions and dissatisfactions.

Another prediction discovered their propensity to believe in certain uses and their intuition about the nutrients delivery mechanism.

The Result

The client received a clear best use case to pursue, indicated by the strong emotions driving it. As both markets deliberated the same best food category for the new nutrient and produced a list of key development priorities, the client can now focus costly R&D efforts with significant savings in time and money.