Spare a thought for the buyer

Their job is to earn as much as they can from a fixed and very limited square meterage of fixture. They can do that by extracting better terms from their suppliers, but by and large they would far rather do it by backing a well-crafted, disruptive concept that engages shoppers and genuinely grows the category.

That is what they are hoping to see in September. It is not, on the evidence, what usually turns up.

Circana’s Europe’s Innovation Pacesetters 2025, covering more than 75,000 launches across the EU6, found innovation volumes down 20% year on year, with just 5.2% of all CPG products qualifying as innovations. One of the lowest levels Circana has recorded.

Kantar’s UK analysis found only one launch in three drives extra sales for the overall category. The rest simply move shoppers from one product to another.

All of which gives a retailer no motivation to make space on an already crowded shelf.

2026 may be a hard year to stand out

Retailers are hoping for insightful, compellingly crafted concepts that grow categories. What they are more likely to see is you and your competitors arriving with much the same ideas at much the same moment.

Virtually every innovation team now runs the same tools. Mintel for the launch database, Black Swan or Tastewise for the trend signal, a model to draft the concept. Nestlé, Campbell’s, Mars and PepsiCo are all reported to be on the same platform.

Greenbook’s GRIT report puts AI use in qualitative research at 72% of insight teams, up from 31% two years ago.

Speed isn’t the problem. The problem is what gets skipped to achieve it. Synthetic respondents are trained on what people have already said, so they recycle old material and settle towards the average — which is precisely the wrong instrument for finding the weak signals and outliers that disruptive innovation depends on.

So the question worth addressing before September isn’t whether your proposition is good. It’s what the odds are that you and your competitor walk into the same buyer’s office with variations on the same idea.

Three weeks to give your concept the consumer-honed edge it needs

McKinsey and Nielsen’s Innovation Practice data suggests optimised concepts generate 38% more revenue and are four times more likely to succeed.

We’ve repeatedly demonstrated the truth of McKinsey & Nielsen’s fourfold success-boost data across dozens of projects over the last thirty years – including this one for Unilever, which delivered 93% concept viability in the USA and 83% in the UK.

Consumer Co-Creation will optimise your insight connection, category growth story, proposition & claims

Week One: Alignment and incrementality stress-test.

We take the proposition apart and test the growth story a buyer will interrogate.

A proposition you know the weaknesses of, before a buyer finds them for you

Week Two: Proposition co-creation. and optimisation

Two sessions with your target consumer. Not “do you like this?” but “what would make this irresistible?”

The language your claim is missing, in the words of the people you need to buy it

Week Three: Claims crafting and the growth story.

Claims rebuilt from the language that actually recurred, not the line the moderator remembered.

Claims and a category growth story your team can take straight into the retailer presentation.

AI has taken our proposition sprints from six weeks to three. It has not changed where the answers come from – the consumers themselves.