How Mars Innovation uses AI for quant/qual feedback at speed and scale

Room 1 | 9:45 am - 10:15 am | Wednesday, February 28, 2024

Cassie Jackson, regional manager of innovation insights at Mars, sits down with Knit Founder and CEO Aneesh Dhawan to show off how Knit’s AI-powered quant/qual platform is fueling Mars’ innovation pipeline.

Cassie and Aneesh dive into how the Knit platform is enabling an unprecedented speed to insight for Mars, with its application of AI technology from study design to storytelling.

Cassie and Aneesh dive into the three core benefits that AI is enabling for the Mars innovation team, through the help of the Knit platform:

1. Marrying quant with qual.
2. Accelerate speed-to-insight.
3. Optimize for storytelling.

Speakers:
Aneesh Dhawan CEO and Co-Founder, Knit
Cassie Jackson Regional Manager of Innovation Insights, MARS Snacking

Innovating icons: A Nestlé case study

Room 1 | 12:00 pm - 12:30 pm | Wednesday, February 28, 2024

Picture this: you sit down at a friend’s dinner party and see ice-cold bottles of sparkling water on the table. Doesn’t this detail make the evening feel elevated, maybe even a little fancy? We think so, and there’s a reason why. Nestlé’s iconic sparking water brands have stood the test of time and have been some of Nestlé’s most popular SKUs year-over-year.

But with massive innovation in sparkling water flavors, new brands and pricing pressures to contend with, how should the Nestlé sparkling waters team evolve their large and fragmented SKU portfolio to remain competitive? This was the challenge Laurence Duhamel-Gravel and her team took on in the Canadian market. They leveraged Dig Insights’ Virtual Market solution to forecast the implications of potential macro and micro changes to their portfolio and pack-price architecture strategies. This tool allowed us to translate numerous potential go-to-market scenarios into unit and dollar and profitability forecasts and to identify an optimal path forward.

Join Marcie Connan, EVP at Dig Insights, and Laurence Duhamel-Gavel, marketing intelligence and strategy lead on the premium waters business at Nestlé Canada, as they dive into how Virtual Market helped Nestlé optimize their suite of sparkling water brands, the benefits of a methodology that recognizes the role of impulse and trade-offs in purchasing decisions and how Nestlé translated insights into retail transformation.

Key Takeaways:

1. Holistic innovation: Redefining the boundaries – Key learning: Innovating goes beyond product development; it encompasses any change that tips consumer decisions in your favor, including pack type, configuration and pricing. By challenging the traditional view of innovation, we open doors to unconventional and impactful strategies.
2. True-to-life decisions in the virtual realm – Key learning: Consumer decisions in the real world are heavily influenced by impulse and context, elements that are often missing in research. We will discuss how to bring real-world drivers of decision-making into your research.
3. Strategic decision-making: Navigating internal dynamics and retail sales – Key learning: Research is only powerful if it drives action. Explore the art of managing internal stakeholders and selling to retailers. This session sheds light on winning strategies for successful decision-making, both internally and in the complex landscape of retail partnerships.

Speakers:
Marcie Connan Executive VP, Insights, DIG Insights
Laurence Duhamel-Gravel Marketing Intelligence & Strategy Lead, Premium Waters, Nestlé Canada

A new era: How John Deere is harvesting deeper insights with conversational, mobile-first communities

Room 4 | 4:00 pm - 4:30 pm | Wednesday, February 28, 2024

John Deere is the world leader in agriculture, forestry and roadbuilding equipment. For almost 200 years, the company has produced technology-enabled products that help meet the world’s increasing need for food, shelter and infrastructure.

In 2023, John Deere saw an opportunity to re-imagine its approach to its long-standing global insight communities. The company recognized that farming has become an innovative, highly sophisticated pursuit. To keep up with its customers, John Deere’s research team needed to rethink traditional approaches which were out of sync with its customers’ behaviors and expectations.

With the idea of a modernizing its approach germinating, the John Deere team decided to partner with Reach3 Insights to migrate its three communities to Rival Technologies. Embracing a conversational, mobile-first approach called Community 2.0, the company has unlocked new research techniques, reduced the time to insights and built deeper connections with customers.

Key Takeaways:

1. Conversational research exercises seamlessly blend immersive quant, qual and video techniques which yield deeper, richer insights.
2. SMS notifications can be leveraged instead of e-mail to facilitate faster and more in-the-moment responses from your audiences.
3. Innovative mobile and video deliverables can help to better engage stakeholders and deepen their understanding of insights.

What does branding taste like? Simply Good Foods explored their own ‘brand taste’ to uncover the consumer psychology behind this common-yet-strange effect

Room 2 | 4:45 pm - 5:15 pm | Wednesday, February 28, 2024

Do you know what your brand tastes like? Simply Good Foods and Curion partnered to explore this question on products in the “better for you” and traditional snack categories. By manipulating brand information, the research aimed to assess consumers’ preferences and perceptions. Participants were first exposed to products without brand identification, allowing for unbiased evaluation of intrinsic qualities. Subsequently the same consumers evaluated the products with the brand elements introduced, decoding the impact of branding on consumer acceptance – aka the taste of the brand! The findings shed light on the intricate relationship between product attributes and brand influence and how consumers incorporate contextual information when drawing conclusions about product preference. So…how does your own brand taste?

Key Takeaways:

1. The taste of your product is influenced both by product characteristics and contextual information, such as brand.
2. By using the tools of psychology and sensory science we can disentangle the impact of brand from other aspects of the product.
3. Both blind and branded product evaluations provide useful information for brand owners and researchers to optimize the characteristics of their products.

Speakers:
Emily Simmers Director, Client Services, Curion
Megan VerDuft Manager, Consumer Insights, Simply Good Foods USA, Inc.

Consumer co-creation: How using real-time consumer feedback allowed Conair to launch a successful new product in five months

Room 1 | 9:00 am - 9:30 am | Thursday, February 29, 2024

Conair will highlight the agile innovation strategies and techniques used to launch the Curl Secret 2.0 in only five months. During this presentation, we’ll show a live demo of how instant consumer feedback was obtained to provide real-time consumer input at each critical stage: targeting; positioning; product development and optimization; packaging; messaging; and point of sale.

Key takeaways:

1. The power of letting consumers drive your innovation process.
2. The importance of getting consumer input at each step of the agile innovation process.
3. Consumer co-creation doesn’t need to cost a lot of time and money.

Unveiling shopper desires: Targeting survey research based on verified shopping behaviors for more relevant, consumer-centric insights

Room 3 | 9:45 am - 10:15 am | Thursday, February 29, 2024

In this insightful session, we delve into the dynamic realm of retail by exploring the intricacies of shopper preferences and aspirations. Retailers don’t always understand what their shoppers truly want and the broad lens of traditional quantitative research is not often enough to demonstrate what shoppers actually desire.

Join us as we unveil the power of targeted survey research specifically tailored to individual retailer shoppers. This session aims to shed light on how more targeted surveys can help you win more at retail.

Key Takeaways:

1. Bridge the perception gap: Understand the common pitfalls in retailer assumptions and discover how targeted surveys can bridge the gap between what shoppers truly want and what retailers believe they want.
2. Precision targeting: Learn methods to identify and segment specific retailer shopper groups to tailor surveys that resonate with their unique preferences.
3. Data-driven decision-making: Gain insights into leveraging survey data to inform strategic decision-making processes, from product offerings to marketing strategies.

Uncovering the thread between personal and brand values: Connecting beliefs with behaviors

Room 1 | 10:30 am - 11:00 am | Thursday, February 29, 2024

Join a presentation led by Tripp Hughes, senior director of consumer strategy and insight at Organic Valley, and Katelyn Ferrara, vice president of client development at quantilope, focused on understanding the influence of emotions and social factors on brand perception and consumer behavior. Leveraging an innovative approach to implicit research, this session will explore ways to uncover consumer values key to driving specific categories. It will explore the link between the values consumers have with specific categories and how brands within those categories align with such values.

Key takeaways:

1. Understand the influence of emotions and social factors on brand perception and consumer behavior.
2. Leverage an innovative approach to implicit research.
3. Explore the link between the values consumers have with specific categories and how brands within those categories align with such values.

Real-world AI in action: How Fossil Group is unlocking empathy at scale with high-trust AI

Room 2 | 12:00 pm - 12:30 pm | Thursday, February 29, 2024

While it may seem ironic, one of the biggest benefits of AI for insights leaders is to better understand how consumers really feel and why. But researchers also need to know they can trust AI to deliver real and unbiased analysis. In this session you’ll hear from the head of research and data science at the Fossil Group, a global fashion leader, about the practical application of AI in their research. This conversation cuts through AI hype, showcasing its practical use in interpreting open-ended consumer feedback and guiding smarter business decisions through empathy. Don’t miss this unique opportunity to learn about AI’s real-world application in market research and insights. Gain knowledge on how to harness AI to foster customer empathy and accelerate your own insights discovery process.

Key Takeaways:

1. Real-world adoption of AI-powered insights technology at Fossil Group.
2. How generative AI can be used to accelerate insights discovery, bringing a narrative-first approach to insights discovery.
3. Understand the “trust-magic matrix” of generative AI for market research and how to achieve high-trust AI insights.

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