Our Health & Beauty Practice

Health & Beauty Innovation: Finding the Next Opportunity

Is your new product targeted towards women aged 25-49? We hate to break it to you, but so is everyone else’s, and therein lays the problem.

The average American woman already uses 9 different personal care products on a daily basis, so there had better be a compelling reason before they will consider adding one more.

But instead of going for a narrow niche—and/or heralding unique features—companies continue to try to offer something that will work for every woman. But that just makes it difficult to get noticed. Worse, by doing so they are ignoring some of the fastest-growing consumers segments, such as men and tweens.

You can see the carnage at the checkout counters. Retailers lose millions of dollars annually because of failed new products, and they place the blame on health and beauty manufacturers for insufficient market research.

And they are absolutely right.

Consumers are always looking for variety and convenience from health and beauty producers. But as those consumers become more health-conscious in all product categories, wellness trends like cosmeceuticals and age-defiance have achieved paramount importance and they increasingly search for innovative products in the category that are relevant to them.

But instead of trying to anticipate what will be the latest trend, too many manufacturers find themselves launching me-too products, only to find that consumers have already moved on to something else.

The bottom line: manufacturers are failing at the basic levels in terms of understanding their target consumers.

Markitecture believes that success in health and beauty comes only from a) dedicating the time and effort to developing a sophisticated process for understanding your most profitable customers and having done that, b) targeting those customers precisely with new and/or repositioned offerings.