On this week’s blog, we will take a look at how organizations leverage configurable data platforms like Skai to increase the impact that analytics has in driving optimal business decisions. We will spotlight how different stakeholders interact with the platform, as it gets deployed across an enterprise organization to support various departmental needs and business objectives.
So far we’ve covered how data and analytics teams use Skai, leveraging the connected data set to save time on data collection and data management; utilizing the accurate data classification technologies and taxonomies, to extract granular, attribute-level insights without the need to create and maintain machine learning rules that may not adapt to changing data sets; and integrating via the API or data mart to enrich the business intelligence environments they are responsible for building and maintaining.
Yesterday, we talked about how consumer and market insights teams use the platform to reach deep into data sources they otherwise would not have access to, and deliver actionable insights to their internal stakeholders in way that really moves the needle. Today we will focus on the product innovation team.
Today’s Spotlight: Product Innovation
Product innovation is a challenge no matter what industry, but CPG in particular relies on new offerings to fuel growth and keep consumers engaged and excited about their brand. This translates into an insatiable need to understand trends and consumer needs and is fraught with risk. As it stands, more than 30,000 products are launched annually and more than 95% of them fail.
Product innovation teams that have used Skai report the opposite, with 3 times more successful product launches and 50% fewer modifications after the product first hits the shelves. How?
The Skai platform helps them to understand adjacencies and ecosystem trends at the attribute level, which generates unique product ideas. Uncovering cross-category interactions can lead to new ways of thinking around specific products, introducing new flavors, textures and ingredients from one category into another. Skai is able to get into the level of specificity through its category-level taxonomies which can assess the volume and velocity of specific product attributes with very high accuracy, and then assess the prevalence of those across different products.
Because the platform uses a continually refreshed data set, product innovation leaders have access to much more than traditional market research and social listening. Traditional approaches to market intelligence tend to yield limited insights – observations of consumer behaviors, analyst opinions, past sales, media spend, etc. but connecting more than 13,000 different data sources offers a much wider perspective to work with. For example, one of the more popular models offered in the platform analyzes consumer needs versus product claims to surface white space opportunities where there is limited competition, as opposed to simply going in a product direction simply because there is a lot of social media chatter. Furthermore, understanding specifically what consumers want or don’t want in a product at the attribute level drives innovation and reformulation opportunities down to the ingredients.
Product innovation leaders gain from faster time to insights and more accurate predictions. Instead of spending time sifting through different data sources and reaching out to consultancy firms and agencies to conduct focus groups, the Skai allows product innovation leaders to configure the platform to suit their needs. With built-in integrations to Nielsen, IRI, Brandwatch, Profitero and other third parties, making the connections and surfacing the signals are much faster and easier, and more accurate since the platform brings together many different data types. The platform has tools for sales forecasting around specific attributes and features combining sales, voice of the customer, key opinion leaders, patents and other sources, and generates scores that can be used to prioritize different directions.
The flexibility and breadth of the Skai platform gives product innovation leaders the confidence in making their next move, underpinned by the proven success of leading brands which have adopted into their organization as a best practice.
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*This blog post originally appeared on Signals-Analytics.com. Skai acquired Signals-Analytics in December 2020. Read the press release.
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