More Than Words

By Jim Prevor, Editor-in-Chief, Produce Business

One of the true services PMA has provided to the industry in the past several years has been an emphasis on consumer marketing. People are listening, but the folks in Newark, DE, need to keep preaching.

Although producers pay a lot of lip service to the consumer, very few are spending the time and money to do real consumer-driven product development.

I was on a weight-reduction program lately, and my maintenance plan calls for a daily workout at 6:00 am and eating an egg white omelet before I go the gym. I spike the omelet with vegetables for flavor and nutrition. Because every second I save in cooking time is a second I get to sleep, I am always looking for convenience produce to put in my omelet. Yet most don’t meet my needs.

I was thrilled to find my local Publix stocking a hard plastic package of sliced scallions. Just the kind of item I was looking for. Yet, I rarely buy it anymore.

Why? It was a 5-ounce package and I only needed a ½ ounce in my daily omelet. In my real life — with an imperfect refrigerator often jammed with food blocking air flow, an imperfect chef who would leave the package on the counter too long and sometimes skip a day or two because he was out of town — the scallions, though delicious and beautiful, deteriorated substantially once the package was open. I never was able to finish the package before the product was unusable.

What would have been convenient for me would be a master package with individual ½-ounce serving packages? Since the unopened container stayed fresh quite awhile, I would have been able to buy a package once a week and have fresh pre-cut scallions every day.

Perhaps my use is atypical and the producer had done extensive research on consumer cooking patterns and determined that 5-ounce packages are the correct size. Perhaps. But I doubt it.

That is the difference between trying to sell a product and trying to meet a consumer need. One approach says, “If I cut the scallions for consumers, it will be more convenient and I bet I’ll sell more.” The other says, “I carefully observed how consumers really live, including how they use, and don’t use, this product, and I’ve learned they typically use it one ounce at a time and, in real life, an opened package only survives three days. Consumers like to go food shopping once a week, so they need ½-ounce packages of my product in a master package of 3½ ounces so they can have fresh, unopened scallions to use all week.”

It is a big change from the way produce products have traditionally been developed. This type of consumer-driven product development would not just serve the consumer with more appropriate products; it would also improve trade relations. Producers of innovative produce items complain that retailers don’t give the products the support to make them work. And the producers have a point. These products are new and unfamiliar to consumers, so it can take months of exposure before they really take off. Many a time you can find a supermarket displaying a single row of an innovative product and, when it doesn’t sell in two weeks, it is not reordered.

Unfortunately, few producers can legitimately demand more space and time because they don’t do the research to make a convincing case that consumers will buy the product if they come to know what it is and that it is available. The research required is different from what passes for consumer research. It includes survey responses only as an adjunct to observational data about how people live.

Lately, a lot of trade associations have gotten into the habit of putting together consumer panels at conferences and trade shows. These are always highly ranked by attendees. But they trivialize the truly difficult work of learning about consumers.

First, the consumers are not geographically representative; they typically are drawn from the local town. They are usually not representative of age, sex, income, ethnic group and a host of other variables. Sophisticated sampling techniques adjust for all these problems by properly weighting a sample, but none of this is evident in a panel discussion. And these people know they are at a produce industry function — distorting what they might say.

Good focus group researchers study dozens of groups in different geographic areas with many different types of people and make sure the consumers being studied never know the study is for a produce group. The results are mostly used to do things such as to define terminology so that a quantitative study can be rolled out. Yet I’ve been in meetings in which senior executives have referenced these open panels at an industry conference and said the consumers told us they wanted something. It is a case of a little knowledge being worse than no knowledge at all.

Gathering a group of consumers and asking them questions is easy; knowing what their answers mean and how much weight to give those answers is the hard part.

On the revolutionary questions, consumer research has its limitations. If in the age of the steamer ships you had surveyed passengers to find out “what they want,” you doubtless would have gotten recommendations for more customer service, better information on ship amenities, more ports of call, etc.

What wouldn’t you have gotten is a mass of consumers saying they want huge aluminum tubes to fly through the air and transport them in hours from London to New York and, by the way, can we have little screens showing picture shows at every chair?

Yet today, over 99 percent of transoceanic travel is on airplanes, not boats. Which tells us that as important as focusing on the consumer is, that shouldn’t be mistaken for simply doing what consumers ask for in surveys. Sam Walton never lost sight of the consumer, but neither did he launch Wal-Mart because a survey demanded it.