Choosing where a snack format could stand apart

The question

The company already made several snacks in a versatile format that can take many shapes, textures and flavors. It had not yet looked at the format as a whole.

Its innovation group wanted to know where the format could outdo what was already on the market, and what would succeed in each opportunity.

Our approach

We started with snacks people already know. In groups, mostly in Asia, people sorted snacks in the format into snacking moments, by look and feel first, then by taste.

A separate workstream was sizing the commercial opportunities, so we set our evidence against its opportunity areas with the client team, and the consumer and commercial views met in one place.

To go deeper on one opportunity, we immersed the client’s teams first and mapped the motivations to explore, which focused the fieldwork in Europe and Asia. Some groups in Asia opened with a walk through a nearby mall.

The ideas came from a workshop with the client’s market, R&D and design teams, built on that evidence.

What the team came away with

The innovation group had opportunity areas for the format, each with a first product profile.

For the opportunity explored further, it had a map of the motivations, product and pack themes to design against, and a body of written and visual ideas, ready for the stages that turn ideas into tested concepts.