Campbell's Connects With Consumers Through Revamped Innovation Process
By Karla Paris
Maintaining its core business while creating new and inventive practices are key ingredient in company’s effort for business growth
Today’s consumers have changed the landscape for any company looking to bring its products to market or simply maintain its market share. Innovation is the key for manufacturers, especially food manufacturers, to keep up with the massive shift in e-commerce, digital technologies, social media, along with the shift in American households.
Campbell’s CEO Denise Morrison addressed how companies must foster innovation during her keynote address at the 35th Simmons Leadership Conference in Boston on April 23. Morrison notes during her address that she applied four basic principles at Campbell’s to further the company’s innovation efforts, which paved the way for innovative products like Campbell’s Go soups, Campbell’s Dinner Sauces, Goldfish Puffs, and V8 V-Fusion +Energy beverages. Here are Morrison’s four applied principles:
- Direct focus on consumers
- Leadership courage to enable cultural transformation
- Structuring teams and people to unshackle creativity and foster bold decision-making
- Creating a sense of urgency through marketing product lines
In order to continually fill the innovation funnel, Morrison has implemented an entirely new breakthrough process at Campbell’s North America. Innovation teams are comprised of a marketer, a consumer-insights expert, a packaging engineer, a product development expert, and a chef. Teams oversee new products from concept through launch.
In conjunction with these innovation teams, Campbell’s is also engaging consumers for product change through its Ideas for Innovation site that was developed to show how ingenuity works within the Campbell’s Soup Company and how consumers can be a part of the creativity process. Concepts generated from Ideas for Innovation typically fall within the company’s primary product areas, but also covers other types of innovation like packaging, ingredients, sustainability, or manufacturing processes.
Campbell’s has been focused on consumer-driven innovation in products and packaging as the primary driver of organic growth. In 2013, Campbell’s grew its organic portfolio of products by acquiring Plum Organics, a brand of organic baby food and simple meals for children.
Campbell’s understands that its new approach to innovation requires both disruptive innovation, so the company can deliver new breakthrough products in new growth spaces, and sustaining innovation, to strengthen its core business while maintaining market share of its current product lines.