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Healthy Lifestyle: Myth or Reality?

Food manufacturers, retailers and restaurants are rapidly designing food and beverage solutions to help people develop and maintain a healthy lifestyle. However, obesity and related health conditions continue to rise despite the best efforts of companies that sell food and beverages to the American population.

Our experience has demonstrated there is a significant gap between the meaning of a healthy lifestyle for the companies that market healthy foods and the people that consume these products. While companies commonly use the phrase “healthy lifestyle” in advertising, this is very unobtainable in the short-term for most people. The few people who truly live a healthy lifestyle focus all their behaviors on maintaining that lifestyle. In reality, most people are just trying to get through their day and are happy with one behavior modification. For example, starting to eat breakfast:

“For the past few days my eating habits have been improving. On Tuesday I started eating breakfast. On Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday I have been consistent before work. I have been eating sourdough toast with Albertson’s brand peanut butter and Motts Apple Juice. On Tuesday I stopped by Pete's Patio and ate a Cheeseburger and chile cheese fries with a large ice tea. I don't like the flavored Ice tea, I always want fresh brewed Ice Tea. I stopped by my mom's house for dinner and she was making ground beef tacos with spanish style rich and pinto beans. I had an Albertsons brand juice to drink and got home and ate a Hostess cupcake before going to sleep.”

The Reality: the meaning of a healthy is personal. Products must fit existing individual routines, helping people make evolutionary health shifts over extended periods of time, rather than revolutionary changes at the same time. Through understanding actual healthy behavior and comparing it to perceptions allows food companies help people evolve their behavior to a healthier lifestyle over time.

We will share our learning as we continue to discover what healthy really means through our own work. Our goal is to help companies see the meaning of health through the eyes of the consumer.

Garbage In, Garbage Out: The importance of quality ideas.

It is widely understood that it takes 100 ideas to produce one successful new product. In fact, innovation metrics for Stage Zero support the practice of generating a large quantity of ideas to be successful.

However, this current practice is very inefficient from time, cost and resource standpoints. It also does not focus on the quality of ideas, only the quantity. Within the walls of corporations, the current idea generation and testing practice is often described as “throwing ideas against a wall to see if they stick.”

So how do companies develop quality ideas that will lead to success? Passively engage consumers in opportunity identification and idea generation.

Knowing what all readers are thinking right now, I’d like to address one point. When I was a member of corporate innovation teams, I often said "consumers can't help you with that" when I knew the innovation tools would not provide our team any more information than we already knew. Engaging consumers in finding opportunities or brainstorming ideas was taboo. The fact was, at that time, there weren’t any tools that would allow consumers to participate in Stage Zero without relying on forgotten, misremembered, or simply unrealized behaviors and motivations.

Now consumers can help with opportunity identification and idea generation. By observing and discussing the workarounds and trade-offs to problems they may not know they have, we passively engage consumers in Stage Zero. Through additional quantification of observed situations the resulting consumer-driven opportunities and ideas are real, and dare I say “validated”? There is not a DWB or Liking score, but the behavioral patterns are large enough to be measured and they were built from actual consumer behavior.

Companies can finally discover opportunities and develop quality ideas from a consumer lens at the start, improving their chances of in-market success.

VOC to EOC: Stop missing growth opportunities.

Companies that rely on the voice of the consumer to make business decisions are missing real growth opportunities.

Marketing investments are made with incomplete information about consumer decisions. Nearly all consumer knowledge is based on interviews, whether it be through ethnographies or surveys. These methods do not paint a complete picture of consumer decisions as they collect a fraction everyday behavior. Academic research has shown that up to 95% of all behavior and thoughts are either forgotten, misremembered, or simply unrealized.

How can brands gain a competitive advantage and successfully grow with a limited understanding of their consumer? Start becoming the eyes of consumers over time, rather than the voice of consumers at one point in time.

Through extended observation of product usage events via cameras, coupled with an on-going dialogue about motivations and rationalizations, companies can identify real behaviors and understand the systems and processes consumers develop to manage their everyday lives. Through careful analysis of these events, companies can also identify the illusive gap between perception and reality and create products that make consumer’s lives better.

When you think about your own everyday routines, how many decisions are on autopilot? How many are influenced by your surrounding environment at the time you make decisions? These are the behaviors that are commonly forgotten during voice of consumer approaches. These habitual behaviors are powerful, missed opportunities that companies need to tap into to improve brand relevance and ultimately, sales.

Convergence: It’s not just for technology.

For years, sales information has been used to define competition for consumer products. But when we bring products into the home and incorporate them into our everyday routines, competition is no longer determined by shelf location.

Competition is more accurately defined by a much broader range of products that can be used to satisfy our needs in the particular "situation" we are experiencing. For instance, how many times have you had something different for breakfast: coffee, a glass of milk or juice, cereal, nutrition bar, eggs, yogurt, toast with peanut butter and even leftovers from the night before. All these products compete for your attention at breakfast.

Similarly, when you are looking for entertainment what do you choose? Do you play video games, surf the web, write a blog entry, talk to friends or family through the phone, IM or email, read a magazine, watch a DVD, or even go to a neighbor's house for a cocktail? These are all forms of entertainment.

What you ultimately decide depends on what is happening in the environment around you at the time, your immediate needs, and how you expect to feel after the situation passes. This means the products that compete in any situation are almost limitless as anything in the home may be used whether or not it’s considered part of your brand’s category definition. In some instances, competition extends beyond the home if an acceptable option can be found at a near-by restaurant, retailer, neighbor’s house or convenience store.

For years, technology companies have focused on developing innovation through convergence. They look at what features and benefits new software and product platforms deliver and what should be integrated into their brands based on how they are used in everyday situations. We see this in the continuous evolution of technology products every 6 months. How often do you see a cell phone that just makes phone calls, PDAs that just replace paper planners or digital music players that just plays music?

Like technology companies, all consumer products have the opportunity deliver innovation through convergence by understanding the actual competition for common situations we all experience everyday.

Why Realsight?

Successful innovation requires seeing the "forest from the trees" and developing the roadmap that creates added value for business, people and society. It seems simple, in theory, but often difficult to execute, as there are many hurdles to overcome including approaches, resources, and organizational processes.

The same hurdles exist when starting a new company. After speaking to many innovation companies, we felt the internal challenge of leverage existing processes were too great to achieve our goals so we built Realsight on our own. First, we identified an industry gap in the front end of innovation using on-going observations and interviews from many sources during our corporate careers. Next, we recruited a world-class team of superior performers in their respective fields, created patent-pending technology systems and developed services that deliver against marketers' needs in this space. Finally, we delivered results: growth opportunities others missed, product and service frameworks that deliver incremental sales and emotional communication messages that build brand loyalty.

Now that we're entering our third year, we wanted to create an outlet to share our stories, ideas, thoughts and observations that will help marketers deliver successful innovation for business, people and society.

We welcome your questions, thoughts and comments as we all work together to innovate innovation.