One of our largest customers, a prominent public food and beverage company, has used Keplar over the last 8 months to accelerate their innovation process and co-create new lines with a living “voice” of their consumer. This company specializes in products tailored for fitness-conscious consumers seeking healthier lifestyle choices. Like many other consumer companies, they rely on qualitative and quantitative consumer feedback to validate, develop, and de-risk ideas.
Traditional methods for concept testing are time-consuming, often taking weeks or months to yield insights. Not only can market research prolong time-to-market, but it can be very prone to bias and product leaks when using real people. Being episodic in nature, market research incurs high costs, amplifying financial risks in the consumer world, where the cost of failure is already very high.
Our customer needed a solution that would allow them to accomplish these three things:
If they can accomplish this, it would allow them to build confidence and de-risk ideas for their upcoming 2025 and 2026 product lines.
Keplar, being a nearly instant and highly iterative way to get feedback, became an obvious complement and accelerant for traditional research/testing.
Here are three core ways in which Keplar helped drive time savings, cost reduction, and a broader idea funnel for this brand.
With an executive directive to take products to market faster, the brand needed to get rapid, iterative feedback on early product concepts for a new line. Traditionally, the studies needed to support this would require 2-8 months of time and a large financial investment across focus groups, surveys, concept tests, conjoint analyses, etc. The financial investment could range from tens of thousands of dollars to over a million dollars for participant recruitment, moderation, data processing, and compensation.
Instead of waiting weeks at a time to receive consumer feedback through a single study, Keplar's “always-on” simulation provided instant and covert feedback, allowing the brand to test various product concepts quickly at scale. The customer generated and tested a high volume of attribute combinations, from nutritional “add-on” to flavors, claims, and pricing. Using Keplar, through a series of foundational qualitative studies and iterative conjoint analyses, they received prompt feedback on which attributes resonated most with their target segment. The lead time for each of these studies was on the order of minutes to hours, enabling the customer to iteratively run multiple studies and ask Keplar audiences follow up questions to dig deeper.
By cutting down the time that it takes to wait for feedback, Keplar allowed the brand to shorten their entire innovation cycle and move through stage gates faster.
Keplar's simulated audiences are designed to mimic real consumer behavior in specific ways. This facilitates not only feedback, but also generative ideation. Keplar audiences can uncover qualitative details about consumer needs and preferences, then use that data to generate new ideas.
In the case of our customer, they used the simulated audience to brainstorm new ideas to expand their existing product line. The audience then came up with new concept alternatives by varying attributes such as flavors, nutrients, benefits, and claims, product naming. This expanded their initial idea matrix from 10 to 30 potential product ideas, showcasing the platform's capacity to enhance the creative process and generate net new ideas.
A scaled simulation such as Keplar can not only bring massive time efficiency speed ups, but also enable net new types of ideation.
The dynamic nature of the modern markets necessitates continuous adaptation. Traditional research methods, being both costly and slow, often result in quickly outdated insights. Keplar's simulation capabilities provided the customer with a flexible, iterative approach to innovation. This allowed them to swiftly adapt their product ideas in response to evolving consumer preferences and market trends, aligning their innovation process with real-time consumer feedback.
Iteration also means using Keplar to co-create: once we have insights and ideas on consumer preferences, and can then use Keplar to help us translate those insights into product concepts.
Here’s an example of how we used Keplar to co-create a “grab-and-go” meal replacement snack from scratch.
We know that there are no “perfect” answers in the world of innovation. That’s exactly why faster innovation, design, and execution cycles matter. Through this partnership, we found that using Keplar can dramatically accelerate the early stages of innovation by broadening the top of an idea funnel, helping select and refine attributes, providing instant feedback, and iterating quickly.
Looking ahead, we are developing new features to further enhance Keplar's value, including integrations with historical sales, POS data, existing primary research, and consumer behavioral data to refine and calibrate simulated audiences.
Interested in using Keplar to transform your approach to product innovation? Get in touch.
.png)
