Here’s how we designed a new product with Keplar simulated customers in under an hour.
Creating new physical products is hard — it’s a windy process with lots of complex decisions and a high cost of failure. Most brand and product people start with market research to identify what customers think, feel, and need. This is helpful, but is slow, expensive, and 1-off.
So, as an experiment, we set out to co-create a new product concept in a growing category, a “grab-and-go” meal replacement snack, using Keplar. We used simulated audiences to quickly get insights and ideas on customer preferences, and then got help translating those insights into product concepts. Here’s how we did it:
First, a quick primer on Keplar audiences. Keplar creates “digital twins” of customer segments based on various input data (pours secret sauce) and these digital twins are fully interactive agents that can provide feedback and help with different innovation tasks. For this example, we built an audience of 150 fitness-centric individuals from the US between the ages of 30-40.
So we start with a simple idea: let’s design a lightweight “grab-and-go” meal replacement product for this fitness centric audience.
Once we have our audience, we can start by grabbing some insights on why our audience would prefer to choose a meal replacement snack (over other options) in the first place:
With Keplar, we can collect insights almost instantly and see summaries of the most emergent themes in audience responses in the “highlights” section. We can browse per-agent responses (from all 150 simulated customers) in detail if we’d like as well.
Here we can see that most people have a preference for snacks that are high protein and low carb. They also value the convenience of “grab-and-go” snacks when it comes to balancing their busy lifestyle. The last highlight is interesting as well, showing that people care about sensory attributes such as taste and texture.
Now that we know why people may use the product, let’s figure out which day-to-day activities may coincide with a need for grab-and-go meal replacements. (By the way, these questions are modeled after the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute’s Category Entry Point framework).
The interesting insight here is that people may use meal replacements both during work and after a workout. This begs a question on how to focus our product’s design and placement. Should we cater to both of these environments or focus on one?
Let’s dig further. Let’s figure out where exactly someone might use a meal replacement product with some quantitative weight. Here, we get the simulated customers to vote on the places where they may use this product (sourced from the last question) and count the results:
Unsurprisingly, the number one entry point is at the workplace, with the very close second being “in the car”. Combining this with what we already know, we arrive at our second important insight:
Next, we can use the Keplar audience to brainstorm ideas. In this case, we’ve asked our audience to help us brainstorm some “claims'' that we can put on product packaging to increase appeal. Here are some suggestions from four different agents:
Now comes the more creative part - to make the product. This is something that we can also ask our Keplar audience to help with. We asked the audience what form they’d like this product to take; and while we received a variety of interesting suggestions, we're going to focus on one idea from the audience for this example, which is the idea of jar packaging with layered ingredients and mixed textures.
This is consistent with the first insight of people wanting something that not only tastes good, but has a variety of tastes and textures. The jar is an interesting idea as it would easily showcase the ingredients and nutritional value.
So let’s now get to the design. Summarizing some of the insights that we’ve gathered from our audience feedback, we know that people want a product that is:
We can then use this information to create a quick product variant using the idea of transparent jars from the audience. And knowing that people will most likely consume this product in a vehicle, we can also design a “to-go” cup that fits in the cup holder of a car.
We know that there are no “perfect” answers in the world of innovation. That’s exactly why faster innovation, design, and execution cycles matter. Using simulated audience feedback can dramatically accelerate the early stages of innovation by broadening the top of an idea funnel, iterating quickly, and refining ideas.
We hope this was a cool demo to check out. Let us know by replying or commenting if there are other products you'd like us to co-design with Keplar for future posts!
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