Guiding Innovation with NPD | Walnut The Human Understanding Agency

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While packaging and marketing activity drive sales, product performance drives repeat purchasing. Getting your product right is key to long term success. Whether it’s exploring new products, optimising current ones, validating your current offer or benchmarking vs. the competition, we use human understanding to get to the bottom of people’s true, instinctive reactions to products. Not only that, we also uncover what drives this liking for some products and not others, and explore how this can guide development.

Our techniques.

Agile Product Testing

Product Benchmarking

Consumer Qual

Co-creation Workshops

SensoryQual

Bespoke Product Testing

Incubator© Community

Sensory Profiling

How we do it.

Successful product innovation

Our 3-step framework for assessing products gives you the best chance of in-market success – can you afford to not take advantage of it? We start by truly understanding whether people like and would buy your product, not just whether they claim they would, but whether they actually would. Then we identify your product’s blueprint so that we can use clever analytics to guide development towards a product that is loved, not just liked.

Adapting to different markets

The landscape of the buyer market changes almost daily, even if just through tiny, topical ebbs and flows. Veganism, the revolt against sugar and sweeteners, the rise of conscious consumerism: all of these phenomena affect the ways consumers buy and brands need to be constantly reacting. Whether it’s small scale changes or complete reformulations. Your competitors are adapting, you should be too.

Overlaid insights, deeper understanding

There’s no set or standardised method for testing products properly. We believe in bringing in techniques from across all areas of research to achieve greater understanding, whether it’s sensory, behavioural science, data analytics or neuroscience, there are always was to enhance the level of insight we can uncover.

Old, new or somewhere in between

Products come and go all the time. Seasonal specialities and limited editions. Brand new or part of an existing product line. There’s always room for development and evolution with products no matter how long they represent your brand for. Ensure your product delivers the most it can for the period it is in use by testing with real consumers.

Learning from failure

Depending on your product, your target market, and of course, the timescales within your business, product development can be a quick and simple process or it can take a few iterations to get it right. Depending on your specifications, we can tailor research programmes to meet your requirements.

New tech for deeper understanding

We’ve been making waves by integrating neuroscience and product profiling to help our clients make the best decisions with their product development strategy. This can provide deeper layers of understanding that more effectively guide the development of your product.

Understanding the nation.

We’ve been tracking the view of the nation since early 2018 on key issues which impact on how we feel about our daily lives. Since the Covid-19 pandemic our study has been used to understand and explore how our feelings towards the situation can impact on our behaviour.

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Product Testing and Development.