Every brand knows that innovation leads to growth. The question is how to identify which path to take on the road to creating truly breakthrough innovations. The answer could already be out there – but in an adjacent category. Uncovering cross-category dynamics and influences give brands a competitive edge, while effectively mitigating risk when bringing proven trends from an adjacent category into their own.
Source: Research & Markets, Research Gate
Remember when bottled water contained just water? Walk into a convenience store today and you’ll find alkaline water, coconut water, caffeinated water, and a variety of other water products. The growing market for enhanced water is a result of cross-category innovation. Many of these innovations originated in adjacent Food & Beverage categories, such as energy drinks, coffee, and juice, before cascading into bottled water as brands began to integrate these trends into their products.
Advanced Analytics Surfaces New Cross-Category Opportunities Driven by COVID-19
In the wake of the COVID-19 crisis, brands are looking for ways to reinvigorate themselves and tie themselves more closely to consumer needs and sentiments. With the landscape changing so quickly, only advanced analytics can surface what is really a trend and what is a fad.
Amidst growing health concerns surrounding COVID-19, Immune Health has become a major area of interest and growth. In our recent webinar, we applied our technology to Immune Health to dive into how this trend is manifesting differently across categories and what learnings can be taken from one category and applied to another. With our advanced analytics platform, we were able to determine how Immune Health has been impacting food and beverage in the last few months, but more importantly, we were able to identify the emerging trends and growth opportunities that we expect will continue to grow in the coming years.
Advanced Analytics in Food & Beverage: Immune Health Across Food & Beverage
Cross-Category Innovation is a Shortcut to Growth. While competitive intelligence is critical, it generally lacks the foresight or timeliness needed to be first to market with breakthrough innovations. Simply reacting to competitor innovations can result in missed opportunities and playing catch up behind innovators. Uncovering cross-category dynamics and influences gives brands the first-mover advantage while effectively mitigating risk when bringing proven trends from an adjacent category into their own.
Consumers Ditching their Diets Amidst Global Health Crisis. Focus is shifting away from diets like Paleo, Vegan, Gluten-Free amidst the global health crisis and moving towards Immune Health.
New Immunity Boosting Ingredients Emerging in Dairy Alternative. New protein sources addressing Immune Health are emerging in the Dairy Alternative category with consumers and influencers driving demand. Brands are incorporating ingredients like mushrooms and alternative protein sources like chia seeds and brown rice to enhance their products offerings. However, despite the immunity boosting benefits tied to these ingredients, there are only a few players in the Dairy Alternative category claiming Immune Health benefits, indicating a still niche opportunity.
Applying Cross-Category Insights from Vitamins, Minerals, & Supplements to Food and Beverage. Unsurprisingly, there has been a significant lift in consumer discussion around Immune Health surrounding COVID-19. In addition to Vitamin C, the universal go-to for Immune Health, other emerging ingredients and solutions, such as Elderberry, Echinacea, Zinc, and Selenium are entering the conversation with massive upticks in consumer interest, largely influenced by key opinion leaders. This is an opportunity for Food and Beverage manufacturers to leverage these emerging ingredients in their own categories to align with consumer demand and win at the shelf.
In Times of Crisis, In Data We Trust
In times of crisis such as the one we are in today, data becomes the most valuable resource, providing direction and confidence amidst overwhelming uncertainty. These insights are impossible to get from a single source and, given the ever-changing nature of the ecosystem as the crisis wears on, keeping up is only possible with the power of AI.
Advanced analytics platforms like Skai empower food, beverage, and consumer goods brands to understand consumer sentiment, monitor the origin and evolution of trends, surface white space opportunities, and track competition.
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*This blog post originally appeared on Signals-Analytics.com. Kenshoo acquired Signals-Analytics in December 2020. Read the press release.
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