FMCG Research Summit

09.00 - Registration & coffee

09.30 - Opening remarks from the Chair

Fraser McKevitt, Head of retail & consumer insight, Kantar Worldpanel

09.40 - Do you need to start marketing to fridges?

Kantar TNS investigates consumer attitudes to the ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT) devices, automated purchasing and what it means for FMCG brands. A radical shift in marketing approaches will be needed in the future (unless you’ve already cracked how to market to a fridge).

Consumers are increasingly conflicted by technology and data. While they are wary of sharing data with brands, they know that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is making use of consumer data to enable automated purchasing that makes their lives easier. This session discusses the implications of these trends for brands. It will look at how technology can be used to build greater trust with consumers about the use of their data. It will also call for a radically different approach to FMCG marketing; a future where brands work harder to build a strong emotional connection with consumers to prevent them from simply delegating the purchase decision to an algorithm.     

Phil Sutcliffe, Board Director, Offer and Innovation Kantar TNS

10.10 - PANEL: You’re not selling eggs, you’re selling eggsperiences

In an experience economy brands cannot rely on messaging alone. Never before have brands put so much money into the creation of customer experiences. And yet the world of FMCG rarely gets mentioned compared to sectors like entertainment, travel, financial services and retail. Should it? Do we not see it? Or does FMCG still operate in a ‘selling product’ world that sits outside of the experience economy? Join panellists as they debate whether FMCG needs to reframe its marketing strategies and the implications for the future of research.

Richard Owen, Chief Transformation Officer - Tempo, Hall & Partners

Annem Hobson, Chief Blogger, and Founder - So Wrong It’s Nom

Justin Stephenson, Managing Director - TPN Retail

10.45 - The retail revolution: optimising real-time experience data for measuring retail display ROI

The role of bricks and mortar retail is changing forever: retail is becoming a media touchpoint with pop-ups and a place for deeper experiences rather than just transactions. Millions of dollars are spent on retail display but when asked by the Path to Purchase Institute, how they measured the effectiveness of P-O-P, 53% of clients claimed to do so through sales with no-one measuring via technology.
MESH will demonstrate a radical new way to understand the how retail display reaches and engages audiences. Using cameras, tech and algorithms, this approach is helping clients understand how display is working, supplying the missing pieces of the path to purchase journey.

Fiona Blades, President and CEO, MESH Experience

11.15 - Morning refreshments

11.45 - Delivering in the moment insights into the ecommerce path to purchase journey

The online grocery channel is set to grow by over 50% in the next five years presenting significant opportunities for grocery retailers and manufacturers. However, there is still much to understand around how shoppers use the online grocery channel. The more ‘connected’ shoppers are, the more complex the path-to-purchase becomes.

This session examines how a new screencast technology delivers in-the-moment insights during online shopping journeys. Hear how the research has led to better understanding of the phases of the path-to-purchase online and which drive the most levels of engagement with shoppers.

Vanessa Henry, Shopper Insight Manager, IGD

12.15 - Harnessing co-creation based innovation from concept development through to launch

Agile FMCG development decisions are increasingly essential in the race to market, with consumer focused development research crucial to keeping innovation on track. WBA embraced this challenge in their development of their biggest brand launch in 20 years, YourGoodSkin™, all co-created with 1,000s of women from the US and UK via a long term online community. The community contributed at all stages of brand and product development – from concept finalisation, testing product, packaging development to comms and claims for the full 23 product range. Hear the complete journey of how innovative, co-creative market research became the heart of a brand.

Susannah Croucher, Research Director, MMR

Phillipa Bradley, Walgreens Boots Alliance (WBA)

12.45 - Lunch

13:45 - '360 Degree Innovation' – generating fresh ideas and developing compelling new brand concepts

Coming up with new, disruptive ideas which are relevant for the consumer is hard to do. So when traditional ideation wasn’t leading to new, surprising ideas, Cillit Bang (Reckitt Benckiser) looked for a more innovative process.

This session examines the '360 Degree Innovation' programme which brought together insights from Insites Consulting’s online consumer community and eYeka’s external expert community in an ideation workshop that generated 126 ideas leading to 3 brand-new concepts, warmly embraced by Reckitt Benckiser’s consumers and employees.

Tom De Ruyck, Partner, InSites Consulting

Francois Pétavy, CEO, eYeka

Mathilde Lévy, Senior CMI Europe & USA, Reckitt Benckiser

14.15 - Combining shopper insights and customer understanding research to identify the emotional and irrational factors driving consumer choices

Bayer wanted to understand how women made purchase decisions on intimate health products, and why some women were buying a competitor product that was inferior in terms of efficacy. Through a programme of research including one-on-one depth interviews, mystery shopping, observation and retail analysis, Bayer unpicked the emotional and irrational drivers of customers’ behaviour that was driving choices in the intimate health category. Hear how the research has had far reaching impact in the business including re-evaluating and realigning the product portfolio, revising packaging and moving from a product to consumer needs mindset.

Sebastian Martin, UK Managing Director, Bryter Research

Jenny Coxon, Consumer & Shopper insights Manager, Bayer

14.45 - Using powerful in-the-moment research to understanding emotional motivations driving consumer choice

PepsiCo noticed a shift in the FMCG market: growth in small, niche snacking brands and it was keen to understand what motivations were driving this growth. Investigating using a traditional quantitative survey and driver’s analysis would have been impractical so Hall & Partners Tempo developed an immersive approach using the latest mobile technology. This allowed PepsiCo to capture real-time snacking behaviour. 250 participants generated over 2,000 moments across two weeks, revealing the deeper, emotional motivations driving consumer choice.

Hear how this solution gave PepsiCo confidence across a range of themes, backing them up with hard numbers. While at a granular level each moment told its own story, the solution enabled PepsiCo to dig deep into motivations from a qualitative perspective, illustrating these with real-life examples.

Sophie Wells, Director - Tempo, Hall & Partners

Laura Wilson, Senior Consumer Insights Manager, Snacks, Western Europe, PepsiCo

15.15 - Afternoon refreshments

15.45 - ROUNDTABLES

A Creating consumer closeness 
Examine how bringing consumers into the heart of the research process can benefit not just individual projects, but inform multiple stages of the full innovation cycle. Exploring the role of communities, video, live data capture and sensors, this discussion covers how blending traditional research with the latest technology can capture consumer reactions and feedback in-the-moment, provide opportunities to spend more time with consumers.

Luisa Robertson, MMR Research

B The cult of cultural insight
Decisions in FMCG are becoming increasingly reliant on data to understand a situation. Yet data viewed in isolation and without cultural context can be misleading. Analysing culture requires looking beyond what people tell you and what they do. We have to find ways in which people’s shared understanding of signs, symbols and myths, and their shared expectations around behaviour, creates social order. This discussion examines how taking a Cultural Intelligence insight approach can help predict consumers’ next moves, and capitalise on cultural values.

Oliver Sweet, Head of Ethnography, Ipsos MORI

C Creating an agile insights environment
In the fast-paced FMCG environment, traditional methodologies aren't always the best option. More innovative, technology-centric and agile research techniques may provide the answers. This discussion examines how to start using more agile research techniques and what types of business questions would be the best addressed by them

Nadia Morozova, Global Analytics & Insights Expert, Bestinsightsphere.com and Startupbootcamp

D Using consumer neuroscience tools to predict behaviour
Consumers are more distracted than ever, with shrinking attention spans and greater choice in how and where they consume media. So how can marketers know if their messages will break through the clutter? Consumer neuroscience delivers insights that go deeper than asking someone a question or having them fill out a survey.  In this session delegates consider what and when are the ‘right’ neuro methods to use? What’s the advantage of some neuro methods over others? Are neuro methods any better at predicting in-market results than traditional surveys?

Dr Nikki Westoby, Director Of Neuroscience, Nielsen

E Building & managing a video insight community
This discussion will focus on the journey and process of creating and engaging a video insight community to build understanding of partners and customers Delegates will discuss how best to engage with a video community, how to unearth essential insight using advanced video analytics and how impactful video can be when shared with stakeholders.

Tom Williams, CFO & Found, Voxpopme

F Brexit basket
Recent research shows that the Brexit vote and ongoing uncertainty is impacting consumer shopping behaviours and attitudes towards retailers, brands and British manufacture. This session considers how brands and retailers should respond and where the opportunities lie for the FMCG sector as we negotiate political and economic turbulence. It evaluates the main threats for brands and discusses emerging opportunities for own label goods, retailers and brands to win back trust and the importance of British manufacture.

Laura Fitch, Research Director, Trinity McQueen

16.15 - innocent – thinking big, still acting small

Large corporates today are grappling with how they develop a more nimble approach to innovation – i.e. acting like a start-up. For innocent the challenge is reversed – its spirit of entrepreneurialism still defines its culture but it needs to fuse this with a robust consumer-led approach. This session explores how innocent is blending a rigorous insight-led approach to innovation, whilst retaining its entrepreneurial spirit, to unlock growth across Europe. It focus on 5 principles that are enabling innocent to think big and act small:

• Fusing multiple insight dimensions to identify untapped potential in categories
• Ensuring stakeholder alignment & training
• Translating insights into commercial opportunities
• Striving for cross-market consistency whilst retaining local market autonomy
• Fast-tracking ideas where relevant but still grounding them in a consumer opportunity

Chris Molloy, Founder & Director, Brand Potential

Jessica Vara, Consumer Insights Manager, innocent

16.45 - Mars: a cultural intervention for pets

Mars Petcare wanted to identify the cultural and emotional levers to drive a behaviour change campaign in the Brazilian pet food market to increase the number of pet owners feeding their pets manufactured pet food instead of human food. The combination of academic-led cultural insight, ethnographic research, mobile diaries, expert interviews and a strategic workshop revealed some core cultural insights for Mars in Brazil.  

In this session Mars Petcare and Ipsos MORI show how applying creative and agile qualitative research, to understand cultural practices around feeding pets in Brazil, went on to unlock 34% growth for Mars and delivered the potential to increase sales by US$10m in year one alone.

Oliver Sweet, Head of Ethnography, Ipsos MORI

17.15 - End of conference