Highlights from Quirk's Chicago - The Chocolate Challenge - InsightsNow Behavioral Research

Recorded: October 26, 2023

With: Brian Briskey, Senior Director of Strategic Consulting

Product Leaders team up to solve the biggest threat to product innovation – VUCA!

VUCA is creating more noise, that leads to insufficient data, which distracts attention, ruins focus, and frustrates efforts to sift through weak signals of consumer demand.
VUCA is creating more dynamism, that negates or outdates models, which leads to poor conclusions, weakens decision making, and damages confidence needed for strategic alignment across the organization.

Hear innovation experts in your industry articulate the symptoms of VUCA which you must immediately recognize to know if you have it truly bad (and can’t afford to make any more excuses), followed by two novel approaches they discovered to help overcome those challenges – starting with a practical first step you can do immediately.

Join us to assess your situation and follow along as we walkthrough the steps to resolve VUCA!

Host:

Dolores Oreskovich

Assoc. Director, Head Consumer Sensory Insights

Nestle Health Science

Kris Wright

V.P, Research & Operations

InsightsNow

Brian Briskey

Senior Director Strategic Consulting

InsightsNow

Dave Lundahl

CEO

InsightsNow

We are fresh back from Quirk’s Chicago where we had the pleasure of networking with friends, partners, and new connections.

The InsightsNow team was so excited to lead the Chocolate Challenge – an opportunity for attendees to evaluate chocolates as a way to experience how we are reimagining competitive benchmarking. How can companies better compare their products’ attributes against competitors and find opportunities to improve their market position?

The traditional approach to competitive product assessments is expensive and time-consuming, usually including blind assessments (no branding) with descriptive analysis to understand how products differ in liking, and to uncover attributes to that need improvement to elevate liking scores.

However, liking is not always the differentiator to drive choice. This is especially true with chocolate, since everyone loves chocolate! Sometimes improving marketing communications is all that‘s needed. Other times, the product needs renovation that goes beyond liking, such as to implicitly signal the claims, promise and/or brand equity through packaging and/or product renovations better.

Our panelists – Cindy Dumlau (MARS Wrigley), Nikki Wollak (Imbibe), and Marcia Young (FlavorWiki) – provided an engaging discussion about:

The merits of testing blind vs branded
Using descriptive analysis vs consumer attribute profiling using FlavorWiki’s patented paired attribute technique
Using attribute-benefit association scoring using InsightsNow’s patented technique
When and how to include choice metrics

Of course, everyone also enjoyed evaluating the dark chocolates used in the Chocolate Challenge – a demonstration questionnaire through which attendees scored various brands and experienced new question types that reinvent competitive benchmarking.

Join in the fun! Experience the future of competitive benchmarking through the sensory experience of eating chocolate. Reach out to do the Chocolate Challenge!

Panelists in the Quirk’s session: