Most global Consumer Goods (CG) manufacturers believe that product innovation is essential to achieving competitive advantage and market share. Consumer product innovation success also leads to increased shareholder value and brand growth. Yet many companies are challenged to deliver. Studies show that half of new CG products fail to achieve their profit objectives, and only 6% generate the category growth needed by retailers to justify expanded shelf space.*
Factors contributing to these low success rates include growing competition, particularly from private labels, steep demands from trade partners, rising commodity costs, increasingly fragmented markets, and weak product differentiation. Nearly 60% of the senior CG executives participating in a recent Sopheon-CGT survey said that their products weren’t sufficiently differentiated from the competition, and only 18% characterized their new products as “highly innovative.” In addition, two-thirds identified product portfolio management challenges as one of the issues impeding their consumer product innovation success. The overall effect of these issues is that many of today’s consumer goods manufacturers find it difficult to maintain margins and grow revenues.
Sopheon’s Accolade® solutions are designed to support the management of consumer goods products throughout their lifecycle, from ideation and consumer testing to commercialization and in-market management. Sopheon’s combination of software, services, and best practices helps CG companies achieve sustainable, game-changing results by assisting them in identifying which products to develop and speeding those products to market. That’s why 50% of the largest food companies in the United States rely on Sopheon to help them better manage and measure their consumer product innovation investments.
For three years in a row, Consumer Goods Technology readers have voted Sopheon one of the top ten providers of new product development and introduction solutions to consumer goods manufacturers. Find out why leading innovators such as Electrolux, PepsiCo, H.J. Heinz, Land O’Lakes, Rich Products, Gold N’ Plump, and Church & Dwight use Sopheon’s innovation management software and services to:
- Improve new product investment decision making, focusing resources on the highest-value brand innovations and ever-changing customer needs
- Enable more effective collaboration within cross-functional innovation teams – and with trade partners – to develop bigger, better product ideas and concepts
- Implement and successfully adopt automated, best-practice Stage-Gate® processes for product innovation
- Accelerate time-to-market and improve consistency in hitting targeted product launch dates and business performance goals
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Nielsen: “Five Ways to Drive True Innovation and Increase Sales” (March 2012)
Stage-Gate® is a registered trademark of the Product Development Institute.