It’s an oldadage about how to innovate and address user concerns. When ford went to ask consumers what they wanted, they said “faster horses”, we realise it took quite a lot of courage and out of box thinking and focusing on the problem, less so the solution that ended up in the creation of the motor vehicle.
Another example- did anyone really think about how cumbersome the wires on headphones were? We just accepted it, we built athletic wear brands around the concept.Until someone just did a way with the entire concept of wires and headphones all together.
Often, we don’t even know what our challenges and/or concerns are until they are magically disappeared. Nobody thought taxi’s were a nuisance, until there was a better option.
This is where tech can come in. To spot the white space before WE even know what's a problem.
PepsiCo just demonstrated that they are leveraging smart AI to enable them to productise faster and faster to address real concerns that the consumer has.
“If you would’ve asked consumers, ‘tell me what your favourite flavours are and let us know what you think would be a great flavour for this brand,’ nobody would have ever come up with seaweed" – PepsiCo
Challenge to Agriculture Companies exporting products overseas: What are you doing to anticipate consumer preferences? How are you demonstrating this? How are you proactively supporting your brand partners, distributors in creating new product offerings, attributes, claims etc, how are you elevating the excellent work being done into end consumer claims and remaining relevant?
Here’s just a small sampling of products that would require no additional change in production, but would capitalise on existing market access compliance requirements and create a consumer value proposition from it.
“Floor apples” – in are cent workshop we realised how many apples are lost to the floor each year in the processing facility. If these were marketed as products saved from the growing food wastage stats, and a consumer knew their purchase contributed to that…
“by buying these apples you’ve just reduced food wastage- you’re a food waste hero”
“WaterResponsible Beef” Beef cattle already grazing on unirrigated land, with a few water monitoring data sources for the catchment area, as proof points.
“By buying this beef you’re aSustainable Water hero- The water is monitored and clean of any chemicals and no excess water is used in the feeding these animals”
“CircularSupply Chain Leather”This leather product was destined for the waste, you’ve saved this from de composting and producing GHG, and you’ve also saved more plastic being produced for the purposes of handbags, which means that less chemicals have to be extracted. The best part is that this product will decompose at the end of it’s lifecycle and won’t clog up rubbish dumps.
“HighMineral Milk” If we shift our thinking a little bit from macro nutrients to micro nutrition, because this discussion is rapidly gaining momentum with the number of companies playing in the individualised micro biome science as a service. If we can get a mineral profile of the soil, the plant and then the milk and prove that there isn’t a deficiency along the process.
We have proof points in soil tests and agri consulting services that deliver this. We have laboratory tests of the end product for this type of claim. We have the proof points. We just need to elevate them.
“Glyphosate free… Anything” Again the awareness of the micro biome has consumers concerned about how they absorb nutrition. By making this value proposition, and then backing it up. You're providing a consumer who is otherwise helpless when shopping to differentiate from other products.
Lead with Productisation New Zealand
There will always be copy cats, some say it’s flattery. We’ve seen that even the most extensive lengths that we’ve gone to in order to protect plant genetic IP rights, doesn’t work when the other parties don’t respect our legal constructs.So what are we do to? We lead.
We continuously lead, we become a literal productisation factory. We produce new value for the consumer every day, we back it up, we make it blatantly obvious that nobody else can measure up to our transparency, we even be bold in our transparency. We don’t need to get it perfect, we just need to be bold and we need to use data and AI to understand consumers better than they understand themselves. Which is why we have the Productisation as a service tool.
Leverage your companies data, consumer trends real time data and understand the best most profitable value propositions and plan your production, sales strategy and procurement strategy from there. Enable your sales team to ADD value upstream to your supply chain, enable THEM to be smarter with their products. If you bring this smart service to them in addition to the freshest, fish, fruit, meat, dairy and produce we can’t be touched. We need to be bold. We need to Lead.
