Automated Webinar Transcript

Carly Shira:  Hello everyone, and I think we are live. Awesome. I'm getting the thumbs up from my team. Thank you so much for joining today amidst the busy summer season. Welcome back to the Highlight webinar series where we are focused on bringing to life tactical ways to build better products for people and the planet.

I'm Carly Shira, your host for today, and this is countering the macro taking back innovation. So in terms of format, we would love for this to be as interactive and dynamic as possible. Please feel free to either drop questions in the Q&A section or in the chat, questions, thoughts, reactions throughout so you don't lose them.

And we'll be sure to allocate time at the end to cover as many as possible. All right, we've got some meaty topics for today for sure, but our hope coming out of this conversation is that you have a stronger sense of clarity and confidence around the pressures that brands are facing, how this translates to consumer pressures, and most importantly, tactical ways to take back your innovation power amidst the the rising macroeconomic pressures that we're facing.

So, I'm gonna sound like the TLDR of your Apple News for a moment here. We're not just navigating a tough macro moment. We all know this. We're feeling it. We're navigating new layers of disruption, which can be totally scary. But what we've found is that in this complexity, there's this surprising, sort of sneaky opportunity to take back innovation on our own terms.

Because let's be real, it's freaking noisy out there right now. The macroeconomic headwinds are strong inflation supply chain policy shifts, pressure on price, pressure on purpose. Not to mention ever evolving global dynamics. I know many of us are trying to innovate, maybe even just operate with fewer resources and a whole lot more scrutiny.

And at the same time, consumers are navigating their own version of this. Tighter wallets, less trust, higher expectations we're, we're feeling it. And so we at highlight amidst the swirl, amidst this noise, asked ourselves and our brand partners, well what does it look like right now to take back control where we can to not just react to the chaos, but to respond with clarity and intention so we can feel a little less like this and a little more like this.

And that's what today's framework is structured around. So to build today's framework, we used a series of different avenues. We interviewed insights leaders, we pulled together syndicated resources. We dove into psychological frameworks and closest to our hearts, we looked at what's working in real partnerships with real products right now.

Last far from least we pulled in the consumer voice. Now we do wanna give a couple important disclaimers here: We're not claiming to be professional economists nor psychologists, so we wanna approach today strictly through the lens of what we're seeing from an insights perspective. And secondly, this, this webinar is devoid of political commentary.

We're strictly focused on innovating great products for people in the planet. So with that plan of action, after spending some time on brand pressures and consumer pressures, we're gonna spend the bulk of our time in this framework, and it's really focused on two key components: The first is driving high impact innovation, and the second is protecting the core.

All grounded in real world examples. Before we dive in, I'm gonna pause real quick. We know that right now the future can totally feel uncertain, but how we respond to it doesn't need to and hopefully this webinar is just one tool in your back pocket to help you feel more empowered as we go into this next phase.

All right, let's do this. We're gonna kick off with brand pressures. Right now we are in a bit of a macroeconomic stew. Holy smokes. We've got inflation, supply chain volatility, tariff, uncertainty, evolving trade policies, you name it, brands are feeling it. Over the course of the past decade, I honestly feel like I can't attend a conference, a webinar, a podcast series without hearing that the world is changing faster than ever, which, you know, it's true, or at least has felt that way in sort of this compounding fashion for a long time now. But what's different in this moment, and is the weight and the complexity of that change, it's not just about the pace anymore, it's about layers, compounding chaotic layers. So we're gonna focus on a few of the most pressing ones.

The first being supply chain disruption and rising costs. So between global instability, climate events, tariff fluctuations, the logistic eco, excuse me, the logistics ecosystem, say that five times fast, is fragile. One report found that the average supply chain disruption cost companies 1.5 million per day, and that doesn't even account for the strategic whiplash of having to redesign skew portfolios just to stay ahead of cost volatility.

So we've got supply chain and tariffs to navigate. Now we layer on pricing pressure and value perception gaps. So consumers are watching their wallets, closely. Private label brands grew four times faster than national brands. Last year they make up over 22% of the market. And even with their own price hikes, they're still about 20 to 30% cheaper than branded products.

And it's forcing brands to rethink how they deliver and communicate value. It's beyond just price. Is it performance? Is it purpose? Is it community? And third, we've got shifts in consumer behavior and expectations. Let's be honest, consumers aren't just savvier now. They're straight skeptical. They want proof,
not promises.

81% say they need to trust a brand before they, they buy from it. Trial looks different, loyalty looks different and especially post pandemic, those sensory trade-offs in compromised product experiences are just no longer tolerated. So as we look at these three external brand pressures, we're thinking about them as these external demands.

As we shift to internal demands, we've got the pressure to innovate faster and better with fewer dollars. Now this was an interesting step to find, to dig up because we're all feeling it, but it was the first time for me, it hit home that 40%. That's the that's the amount that the innovative average innovation lifecycle in the CPG and R&D spaces has shrunk in the past decade.

So we have to make decisions faster. We have to move faster and in this sprint to make decisions, we're often an insight overload. There's more data than than ever, and somehow it feels really hard to find clarity. There's a massive opportunity to connect the dots in a way that actually moves product decisions forward.

Okay. That was a lot. We just talked through a bit of stat soup, but what does it mean? Simply put, brands are expected to navigate more complex systems pressures and policies with fewer resources at a faster pace than ever. We've got an increasing pace of change. We've got increasing complexity resulting in decreased clarity of how we respond to these demands that are coming from all sides.

In other words, our jobs in the insights world are hard right now. And we've got that's just one side of it. When we flip the lens, if brands are feeling the pressure, consumers are living it. And not just in spreadsheets and boardrooms, but in grocery aisles in the late night online scrolls that all of us wish we didn't do in subtle recalibrations that we all make day to day.

PSA, I know in research it's very dangerous to play the end of one game, but I'm gonna lean in here. I don't know how many of you shop at Safeway. It's like akin to a Kroger. But the Safeway app is now my new favorite game over the course of the past year if I don't walk away from the grocery store with at least like 19%, yes, totally arbitrary, cost savings.

On my receipt, I have failed my shopping mission and I know I'm not alone because what we're seeing is that consumers are navigating overlapping pressures that mere brand challenges, but with far less insulation. So we've got inflation concern is high, 81% percent of consumers listing inflation as their top concern.

We've got, choice paralysis and option overload with a casual 75% just abandoning the shopping cart when they feel overwhelmed by choice. And lastly, people are burnt out. And while this doesn't have a stat behind it, we see it in our Instagram reels. We see it in the slew of articles, in the constant onslaught of information that we're all taking in.

Simply put, people are strained, people are overloaded, and people are tired. So we wanted to hear directly from consumers about what this meant to them and to keep the data as, as close to real time as possible. Um, we completed this study actually this past week in July of 2025. Across end of a thousand highlighters.

That's what highlight calls. Its proprietary community of respondents, and what we found is that 62% of respondents share that money feels either somewhat or much tighter than a year ago. And with that, folks are taking actions right now to better manage funding. 67% are eating more at home, 55% are buying fewer non-essential products, 57% are shopping sales. More accurately, some things people just aren't willing to budge on. And I loved seeing the data emerge about what those things were, because it very much so resonated and it really comes down to high quality food, personal care routines and their emotional support, coffee as a staple of everyday indulgence.

And there is a ton more in this study that we'd love to dig into. We don't have enough time today, but please feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn here. You'll see a little scroll and it'll bring you to my LinkedIn. I will send you the full results directly, so you can see how some of the numbers and verbatim shake out.

It is really interesting to see some of the differences between males and females, particularly within that. What are you not willing to budge on world at the moment? Okay, so we know people are feeling financially strained, people are feeling overloaded, and people are feeling tired. It's showing up in the choices that they're making every day.

But what does it mean for the brands who are working so hard to connect with them? Well, we've got increased choice, higher expectations with less discretionary budget and less certainty resulting in a more demanding, less predictable consumer. Which brings us back to feeling like this woman who is obviously so stressed about whatever she's looking at, as you can see through the fact that one, she's so stressed.

And two, the quote that says, "Obviously I'm so stressed about what I'm looking at", but that's the end of our doom and gloom. It's critical that we spend this time upfront understanding sort of this holistic landscape of consumer and brand pressures because it allows us to be more informed about what to do next.

We're moving from this to this obviously cool, confident collected insights, professional slash brand innovator who feels like she has it all together and totally under control and has a perfectly pressed suit jacket, which absolutely never happens when it sees the light of day. Enter your toolkit.

She's got that obviously in her jacket pocket probably. This toolkit is built on maximizing resources in order to confidently respond to how rapidly evolving consumer preferences, and the cultural context of our macroeconomic conditions. So we've got sort of three pieces of advice here that we're gonna walk through.

First, adopt an iterative foundational mindset. Second, drive high impact innovation by bridging disciplines. And third, protecting the core through proactive as opposed to reactive renovation research. Part one, adopting that iterative foundational mindset, deeply understanding how consumer perceptions, expectations, behaviors are evolving.

The main idea here is that rebuilding does not have to mean starting from scratch. We oftentimes treat foundational research like this one time event. But, in a world where consumers are evolving, in real time, foundational work has to evolve with that. It's not a relic, it's a rhythm. I do wanna say, as a side note, I think that we as an industry are getting better at this.

We're more akin to adopting this iterative mindset, by continuously checking in on how consumer expectations are shifting. Not just when something's broken, but proactively with intention. And we were working with a leading food and beverage company. They were focused on breaking into this adjacent space of, of high protein, plant-based protein snacks.

There was a ton of foundational data and historical preference trends, all the good stuff there, but if they would've had this mindset of restarting all of it. That would've been a massive endeavor. That's incredibly intimidating. So of course, in the midst of their sprint to break into this adjacent space, they're running on a shortened innovation timeline.

Of course, got the dreaded call from leadership. Hey, your budget's been cut by 50%. I think a lot of us, sorry if that's triggering. I think a lot of us are experiencing that right now. Rather than skip research altogether, what they did was they looked at how they could leverage this iterative mindset, and in this case, thought about it as within study iteration.

So what they did is that within the same study, they leveraged this pretrial sort of quantitative exploratory study. Think like a and new style, to develop category understanding, and then they sent four of the leading existing plant-based protein snacks in home. What that allowed them to do was confidently identify where their competitors were, over and under delivering against consumer expectations.

So they walked away with deep foundational understanding as well as product specific feedback. And that's just one example of what this behavior, this mindset, this paradigm can look like. But the main takeaway here is that rebuilding is not restarting. Part two, driving high impact innovation by bridging Disciplines.

So, adopting this agile product intelligence approach that bridges this gap that we oftentimes see between consumer sensory and insights schools of thoughts. So the second shift in mindset here is about how we innovate, not just what we launch. So too often what we see, and I think that there are massive efforts to solve this, but what we see is that product teams often operate in silos.

Sensory owns one lane, insights another R&D and other, but the consumer doesn't experience our product in parts. They experience it as a whole and what's tricky about that is the most powerful innovations come when the teams are aligned on that truth of holistic product experience. We are partnering with a leading food manufacturer who's working to develop against very real need right now, the unique needs of the GLP-1 consumer.

And in early research, what they found is that the product couldn't live up to the sensory standards that people had when it was tested in isolation, it consistently under delivered against consumer expectations. However, when paired with communication around the unique problem it was trying to solve how this particular product was differentiated in the core benefits, the team found that they could clearly identify trade-offs that consumers were willing to make.

So by combining this insights world, the concept resonance, those benefits, the problem with consumer sensory, I think things like penalty analysis, deep sensory feedback to identify key areas of optimization, they found that consumers were willing to make really clear sacrifices on certain elements of sensory, when grounded in the holistic concept.

The revolutionary part here is not combining data we do that day in and day out. It's in collapsing the steps along the product development cycle by intentionally integrating insights and sensory to maximize the real estate of each and every engagement we have with consumers because they are straps right now.

So I know this is where in context learning can be so powerful because you have that opportunity to, to bridge together within that same study. Okay. Lastly, we're gonna talk about the core. It's so easy to get caught up in what's new, but the truth is your core products are often your most powerful assets.

And right now they are under some serious pressure. All of the things that we talked about so far, supply chain volatility, cost cutting mandates, evolving consumer expectations, those are hitting our existing products, sometimes the hardest, but protecting the core doesn't mean freezing it in place.

And we're all trying to get ahead of these changes. It means staying ahead of those shifts before it breaks your product promise. So, one brand, they came to us mid, we'll call it like a cost cutting crisis. They ultimately had to shift formulation because of some of the changes in, in supply chain and their instincts, was to reformulate quietly hope loyal consumers didn't notice.

By the way, not knocking the importance of discrimination testing here, but instead we worked with them to listen to their consumers. And what we found is that the preferences of their most loyal consumer base had actually evolved a bit over time. So they were able to innovate against that and use that as an opportunity to reconnect with their loyal consumers and evolve with them.

They also brought in this separate cell of lapse to disengaged users so that they could one, identify how do we keep our loyal consumers and two identify, is this an opportunity that we can bring in those that we've lost? So cost getting measures are really complicated. Supply, this is just one part of it.

Supply chain issues causing reformulations are not fun. But what we've seen is that the earlier you bring in the consumer voice, the easier it is to get ahead of the impact. That's what we mean by that, proactive versus reactive. Okay. We wanna acknowledge that one of those challenging aspects of respond to change can feel like you have to.

Get to everything everywhere, all at once. So, we wanted to create a checklist to help ensure that you feel good about what questions you're answering, when you're staying ahead of evolving consumer needs. You're de-risking innovation. You're validating with confidence. So as a handy dandy checklist here that we'll send as a follow up, you can see that we've structured some of those core elements, key questions by each of those stages.

And there may be pieces that you feel super confident about, like, boom, I feel so great about where my consumer is willing to pay right now, the price range that best aligns with our consumer perceptions. I can check that off and I can reprioritize elsewhere because, in conversations with our brand partners, that's the trickiest part right now is reprioritization.

What is most important for me to accomplish right now, given the breadth of knowledge I have and how quickly things are changing? Of course this isn't a comprehensive list, but it's a good starting point, and we've got this on the other side too. On the renovation side, there's multiple elements that underpin each of these stages.

So, we've got a few of those key questions to check off along the journey. Have no fear, we'll send it as a follow up. Okay, here we go. Taking a moment to zoom out. Yes. The pressures we explore today are real. They're not just headlines, quarterly reports. They show up in supply chains and dashboards in your meetings and how you're approaching your day-to-day life as a consumer and in your job.

And for consumers they show up in the checkout line, in these quiet trade-offs that we're making at the grocery store and the mental load of trying to choose what's worth it and emotional support coffee makes, makes the cut. We're all in some way living these dynamics, but the power in naming these pressures is that we can also choose how to respond to them.

Innovation isn't dead. It's not too slow, it's not too risky. It's simply evolving. And now more than ever, it's about clarity, connection, confidence in the brands that aren't willing to sacrifice that deep consumer understanding. They're the ones that are getting closest to their consumers, staying grounded in what's real.

So as we leave today. We innovate, we invite you to innovate. We invite you to see these challenges not as walls, but as design constraints when it feels so noisy. Our hope is that by understanding how the pace of change in these layers of complexity interact. You feel more empowered to proactively approach navigation in this world.

You've got the toolkit, you have context, you have a community, us and likely everyone on this call to keep building with. So with that, there's a, a huge thank you for joining. We packed a ton in today. We're gonna move to the Q&A portion of our time. I'm gonna stop sharing my screen and I'm gonna head over.

We've got a few minutes. Here we go. Let's see. We've got, is there a framework that you would recommend that we can bring to our decision makers? Oh, I love this. Decision makers. Let's see. I'm trying to, what the question went away That was so funky.

Let's see. I'm trying to go back to the decision. Oh, okay. Is there a framework that you would recommend that we bring to our decision makers so that innovation doesn't come as a nice to have, but rather than a must have? Yeah, there's, I would love, please feel free to reach out to me directly because there's stats that we didn't cover today that talks about, that essentially underpins this concept of.

Innovate or die. That sounds horrible. That sounds like very stark. But what we're seeing is that right now innovation is one of the main avenues to drive consumer connection, and whether that's through renovation of existing products or innovation of new products, there's, there's some really interesting data that, that could support internal stakeholder conversations.

So more to come there. I think sometimes it's best to come with receipts and, and we have, we have some data to support that. 

Great. Okay. We've got, what's the best way to prepare for impending supply chain shifts, even if we're not sure exactly what they'll be yet? I think this like if we could crack this code, my gosh, that would be phenomenal. I'll share, I'll share my opinion, based off of what we're seeing work successfully right now with our brand partners.

A lot of it has to do with that iterative, foundational mindset, but doing it in advance of when the anticipated, supply chain shift or formulation shift. Shat that allows you to do is understand what's most important from a benefit and a sensory perspective for your consumers so that when the time comes when holy smokes, I have to reformulate this product.

If you understand that the crunch of this chip is the thing that makes people love your product, that's a non-negotiable. So identifying a non-negotiable, versus those nice to haves. One of the ways that we've thought about this in the past is primary versus secondary benefits. For instance, in the cleaning world, I would love if it was totally eco-friendly, but I need it to work.

I would love if it smelled great, but I need to make sure that as a caretaker, when I put somebody in the bathtub, that I know it's safe. So we're starting to see these offs between the nice to haves and the need to haves. That's one way to get ahead of supply chain shifts, is by having that foundational knowledge in your back pocket.

Okay. And what are some examples of questions I might ask my consumers to better understand what's most important to them? Okay. That kind of, that kind of plays into what we just, what we just talked about. So there's so many different ways that we can think about what's important to consumers and, it depends on what you're trying to accomplish.

So sometimes there's, there's value in just getting stated, as we start to think about benefit hierarchies or functional and emotional associations with a particular product or under understanding what their day-to-day looks like and the problems that your particular product is solving when we come at it through this sort of jobs to be done framework, the functional, emotional, social outcome. There's an opportunity to identify what is this solving for my consumer. Another lens that we can think about it through is the discrepancy between expectations and outcomes. So. When we think about the biggest opportunity areas under met or unmet needs for consumers, oftentimes we see it when there's a really big difference between expectations, what we thought the product was gonna do for us, versus outcomes, what the product actually did.

The closer those align, the better we are at delivering against consumer needs. In terms of how we get to those questions, different avenues, there's a NU style of work where you can include benefit hierarchies. There's deep, foundational work that you can do from a qualitative perspective to bring to life the consumer voice.

Live a day in the life of your consumer. And I think a huge part of it is the analysis around what's a primary and a secondary, and you can identify that through, through trade-offs of product or sensory work at that product level. But from an insight standpoint, a lot of it has to do with getting close to what your consumers are looking to solve right now, existing frustrations through that foundational qualitative and quantitative work.

And at the product level, it's about what aren't they willing to sacrifice at that attribute specificity in order to drive towards innovation. I think that we've got time for one more question.

And it looks like it's fairly similar. As we start to think about staying ahead of potential incoming regulatory updates, this is where there's so much interconnectivity between what we do in the insights world and the sensory world as brand partners and how our category planners, our financial partners are making their decisions.

This was not work related, but in a conversation with a close friend who's a category planner, and she was like, the only way that we can do this right now is by being really close to our cross-functional partners. Like there was a previous world where consumer insights was over there, and me as the financial planner of a category didn't talk.

We can't, we don't have that luxury today, so that's less about research and more about internal dynamics, would be my thought there. Okay, great. Thank you so much, just want to mention please feel free to, to connect with me on LinkedIn. I'll send the one pager of the, the results through directly to you.

I know I've got some stats to share directly around why innovation is so important and what we're seeing as the impact of innovation to connect with consumers. And of course, just feel free to reach out to me with any questions, any feedback, and we're so excited to hear what all of you are doing to stay ahead of everything that's changing right now.

So thank you again, and we're so excited to hear what everybody does. Bye.