INSIGHT: Seven Reasons Innovation Fails at Retail

You may be sabotaging your innovations at retail before you even start. Excluding the shopper from the retail innovation planning process is the mistake most often made by brands.

1. Answering questions that are not being asked by shoppers or the market
2. Failure to address shopper questions that are being asked
3. Failure to appreciate in advance the requirements for successful innovation, deployment, execution
4. Failure to understand which improvements will be apparent to shoppers and which will need to be “trained”
5. Failure to meaningfully evaluate the impact / acceptance of any innovation well and quickly enough to adapt / improve / replace it
6. Failure to appreciate and dimensionalize the difference between what needs to be innovated and what does not
7. Failure to understand shopper and category Cultureography