Meet the consumers! They will undoubtedly give you great insights!

This mantra was always intriguing to me when working as an ice cream scientist in industry – except the reality of the situation was far from what I expected.

In the past, whilst working with consumer focus groups to develop new ice cream products, I thought the idea was that we could just put the consumers in a room, ask them a few questions about what products they wanted, and they would tell us - simple.  Then, all we had to do was take that consumer brief and make it happen.

But this idea doesn’t work in practice, because, more often than not, consumers don’t really know what they want.  But they know what they don’t like when they see it.

So, on the occasion that I did attend one of these consumer focus groups, I realised the session was more about showing the consumer a series of potential ideas and then waiting for them to tell us which ones they didn’t like.  All these new product ideas, lovingly put together with all the best of intentions, only for them to be discarded in a heap. 

A mentor of mine once summarised this in the following way:

“Having this type of feedback is like a mother being told that their baby is ugly”. 

So, for us scientists and developers, this feedback was sometimes hard to take, but a necessary ‘rite of passage’ to finding that new product that would resonate with the public.

The Takeway?...

As scientists, we pride ourselves on our ingenuity, resourcefulness and problem-solving skills in the face of new challenges, but to survive in industry, we must also be prepared to let go of our ideas, even if they could never be ugly in our eyes.