New product planning: where does your team usually start?

Every brand seems to start new products from a different place. Some begin with customer reviews, others with a supplier meeting. Listening to the industry, the starting points usually fall into a few groups.

Common starting points

• Customer complaints and reviews: fixing a pain point that keeps showing up in existing reviews. Lower risk, though some say it can be less innovative.
• New ingredients or tech: starting from something a supplier pitched. Easy to differentiate, but often hard to explain to shoppers.
• Trends and competitors: following a category that is taking off. Speed matters, but you risk getting lost among lookalikes.
• Channel and price strategy: set the retail channel and target price first, then build the formula backwards. Realistic, but some worry it flattens the product's character.

Whatever the start, a common view is that R&D and marketing seeing the same picture early is what makes or breaks a launch.

Where did your team's latest launch begin?

#ProductPlanning #BeautyBrand #ProductDevelopment #BeautyIndustry