In this session of Highlight Showcase 2025, get a sneak peek of what's new and exciting in the Highlight platform - including the latest and greatest features powered by Highlight AI. Innovation teams are using the Highlight product intelligence platform for more and more research purposes. Have a watch to see why and how.

Automated webinar transcript

Deirdre Norris, VP of Product at Highlight:  Good afternoon! I hope you’re enjoying the second annual edition of the Highlight Showcase, the year’s premier event for CPG & retail innovation professionals. 

My name is Deirdre Norris, and I’m VP of Product here at Highlight. I’m here to host your next Showcase session: How Highlight’s product intelligence platform is delivering high-quality insights, faster. In the next several minutes, you’ll get up-close-and-personal with some of the latest features in the Highlight platform that are making it easier and faster than ever to do great research.

It’s been a tremendous year here at Highlight. As we have the privilege to serve more and more customers across the CPG and retail worlds, we also learn so much. Afterall, what kind of consumer feedback platform would we be if we didn’t take our own advice and learn from our customers? We’re incredibly grateful to all the Highlight users who have provided their feedback, communicated their needs, and offered their suggestions. Your contributions feed the continuous improvement we’re dedicated to at Highlight.

So, what change have you had a hand in driving? The Highlight team has been hard at work investing in more ways to help you and your team deliver the kind of strategic insights that drive product success, growth, and resilience. That means:

More research modes. Whether you’re early in discovery mode, bringing an innovative product to market in a competitive space, renovating an in-market product, or keeping a pulse on how shifting consumer behaviors and preferences may be impacting your category, you can get to the story fast on Highlight.

Features for teams. We know that insights are better when shared. That’s why we’re building features like shareable survey previews and quicker ways to report on findings that get the whole organization on the same data page.

AI-powered product intelligence. AI has proven incredibly powerful for reducing the timeline from raw data to actionable insights. You’ll now see “Highlight AI” at work throughout the platform where it’s making research faster and easier than ever.

In sum total, the changes we’ve made over the last year to the Highlight platform aim to give our users the best in class research that used to only be accessible to the biggest brands in the world. Now, Highlight is putting these same capabilities in your fingertips. 

Let’s take a deeper dive into each of these three key ways in which the Highlight platform has evolved to meet your research needs.

Research is as varied as the business questions your teams may have, so Highlight users need a flexible solution that provides high-quality research to fuel the entire product lifecycle, from screening early concepts to renovating a fifty-year old product formula. 

If you attended Highlight Showcase last year, you’ll recall the debut of Survey Blueprints. These in-platform templates are designed by Highlight’s in-house research experts to provide best practice for your research use cases. Today, Highlight’s platform provides:
- 160 different Survey Blueprints to meet your unique research needs
- The platform also has a comprehensive, searchable Question Library, so you can drag and drop additional questions into your survey to cover all the answers you need
- Need to customize for your needs? Add a custom question, borrow a Recommended Question, or paste in a pre-written question.

These are just a few of the ways the Highlight platform has evolved to make sure teams have the flexibility and rigor necessary to answer every question for every research need.

We also know that research is rarely “one and done.” The  platform makes it easy to duplicate past surveys and re-use audience parameters so you get the consistency you need to compare apples to apples with each successive test, or measure changes over time as your prototypes or SKUs evolve. 

Take the example of one household name beverage brand that was looking to reformulate. They first used Highlight to survey 500 consumers for their preferences on product ingredients. In this first entirely digital test, they found that consumers had developed a strong preference against the use of any artificial food dyes. Their next study sent a reformulated physical product to the homes of 180 product testers to assess how the product performed in the context of a consumer’s organic environment and routines. A segment of these testers also submitted video testimonials providing even richer qualitative feedback sharing their impression of the new beverage formula.

The results? Within only three weeks, the beverage team had the consumer insights they needed to move forward with the new formulation and relevant messaging–all with the confidence that only authentic, high-quality consumer data can bring.

Highlight users like this beverage brand are already using the platform at each stage of the product lifecycle, building on the work they’ve already done, by using surveys, audiences, and data collected from earlier projects to form a complete view of their product’s success over time. 

Soon, Highlight users will be able to go a step further. By creating a unified “multi-project dashboard” in the platform, users can analyze multiple research projects, compare results, and learn over time.

It’s not just R&D teams that need this kind of consumer data. We’ve heard from customers across industries that other teams across their organization are eager to see the insights they’ve gleaned in the Highlight platform. That’s why we’ve invested in creating more ways to share the data love, as it were, with other teams and stakeholders. For example:

- Before you launch your survey to your respondents, you can share a preview of the survey with your team and other stakeholders to ensure everyone is aligned and ready to go.
- Your photo responses can be downloaded and shared. Your crosstabs and penalty analyses can be exported for ease of distribution. You can instantly download presentation-ready Powerpoints to share your research results with leadership and the rest of your organization. We’ve heard feedback from users that their sales teams are loving these slides to take to meetings with current and potential retail partners.
- Most recently, we’ve made it easy to invite your colleagues into the Highlight platform and notify them about relevant projects. 

And this is just the beginning of all the collaboration features we have planned within the platform–so stay tuned for more. 

Finally, this wouldn’t be a product keynote without talking about all the ways that AI is transforming the platform to make high-quality research faster and easier. Today you’ll see a few previews of Highlight AI, but Highlight user Kelly Murphy, Managing Director at LOLA may have put it best when she said this of her experience using Highlight AI:

“The AI summaries are incredibly valuable,” said Kelly. “Open-end responses are always the arduous part. Is someone really going to read through all those thousands of responses? Having that done for you reduces the amount of time from insight to action.”

While Kelly was speaking specifically about the way Highlight AI automatically analyzes your open-end responses and verbatims so you get crucial answers, faster, this is a great overview of why and how we employ AI within the Highlight platform. It’s all about ensuring the same quality you expect of research professionals at speed and scale. 

We’re excited about the ways in which blending cutting edge AI, research expertise, and honest, high-quality feedback from members of our community delivers outsized advantages for our customers. Here are just a few other ways Highlight AI is popping up throughout the platform to help you do great research, faster:

- As survey responses come in, Highlight AI checks for response quality. Instead of manually checking responses, which takes hours or days, Highlight AI handles this in real time, providing valid results faster than you can click “refresh.”
- You already saw how Highlight AI summarizes your open-ended responses so you can move from insight to action, faster. Highlight AI also groups responses by relevant topics and themes in real-time, allowing multi-topic associations per response, showing you common keywords repeated throughout your responses and allowing you to filter by those keywords with a click. Discover predominant or unexpected themes in customer feedback, instantly.
- Remember those Powerpoints we mentioned you can share with your team? Those are all thanks to Highlight AI. Condense a day’s work into moments with what we call Instant Reports - customize your reports by segment, product, or confidence level, then hit Create, and within moments, you have a report summarizing findings and ready to share to leadership, your sales team, retail partners and beyond.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on the big investments we’ve made with more research modes, features for teams and collaboration, and AI-powered product intelligence. Looking ahead to 2026, we’ll continue to add more AI-powered intelligence, research options, advanced survey features, and capabilities for growing teams. Some new areas will include support for custom communities and even more logistics flexibility. We’d love to hear your thoughts and incorporate them as we continue to evolve the Highlight platform.

Thanks for tuning in to today’s product keynote session! The Highlight Showcase continues with more great programming, so keep watching for more great insights from the CPG pros creating products people love.