The process of launching a new product in the market can be a daunting one, even for companies with years of experience and success. Customer validation often comes in the form of focus groups and desperate attempts to understand consumer sentiments and desires in a fast-moving, competitive market landscape. The process is slow, labor-intensive and limited to specific sources and time-bound activities.
As a result, this major petcare company was struggling to keep up their desired pace of innovation.
They sought an external data analysis framework that:
- Leverages AI and machine learning, rather than processes dependent on human analysis and monitored focus groups;
- Delivers timely, ongoing insights, rather than just retrospective analysis or a one-time data set;
- Provides a full market landscape view, rather than just depending on one data type.
After launching a rigorous selection process to rate the available business intelligence vendors, the company decided to move forward with Skai. The decision was based on Skai’s ability to configure the platform to their needs and deliver timely and actionable business intelligence that was based on a broad range of data sources.
Actionable Business Intelligence Served Across the Enterprise
The Skai platform highlighted an uptick in pet owners’ positive sentiment surrounding bone broth over the past two years. This was an intriguing data point in itself but required more substance to be actionable.
Powerful visualization elements in the cloud-based user interface (UI) called Playbook supported company and category specific analyses, from emerging trends, sentiment scores, prevalence of consumer discussions versus product availability on the market and more. These dashboards empowered team members throughout the company (not just data scientists) to independently and quickly surface relevant opportunities and predictions. Together, the CMI, R&D and Marketing teams were able to research, create hypotheses, and test linear options in just a few hours on a task that would have typically taken months using traditional methods.
Their findings?
- Consumer interest in bone broth had been growing the past two years
- Key Opinion Leaders talked about its healthfulness
- Product claims highlighted several associated values (organic, homemade, etc.) and resonating benefits (digestive health)
With these points, the team had the confidence to proceed with a new line of products, which yielded much higher rates of return right out of the gate. Getting it right the first time was a big win for the team and the company, which is expanding the use of the platform and configuring it to support other business units and product lines.
Future-Proofing Their Business
By automating the collection and processing of data, and tapping into a broad external data set, the company realized massive efficiencies in its data analytics function and beyond. Instead of building a home-grown solution supported by an army of analysts and data scientists, this major petcare company was able to achieve significant benefits:
- 50% decrease in post-launch modifications
- 300% decrease in the time needed for new products to be brought to market
- 90% decrease in the cost of surfacing insights and conducting analysis
- 10x decrease in time-to-insight over traditional business consulting and market research
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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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