Creating New Foods. The Product Developer's Guide

CREATING NEW FOODS
THE PRODUCT DEVELOPER'S GUIDE

CHAPTER 8
Summary: Bringing It Together

8.6 THE DIFFUSION OF INNOVATION

In product development, there needs to be an understanding of how an innovation spreads through a company, a market, a society, so that the new product is not presented with an insurmountable barrier such as the managing director's lack of future vision or fear of risk-taking, fierce and unprincipled activity by competitors, retailers' inability to accept a concept outside their experience, consumers' fear of a new technology, and so on.

Examples are the initial failure of liquorice ice-cream because retailers could not accept black ice-cream, the divestment of aspartame as a sweetener from the original company because it did not fit, and consumers' fear of biotechnology in Europe which slowed down the introduction of genetically modified foods.

There is a need when studying diffusion to look at the total food system for the product from farmer/fisher to consumer, as the blocks to diffusion can occur at any place in the food system. Diffusion occurs through the complete channel from the land and sea production, to ingredient processor to food manufacturer to distribution to retailer to buyer to consumer and even to the waste disposal organisation. Change at any point reverberates along the channel, may be mildly but often strongly. So in studying diffusion there is a need to consider the whole channel.

Timing is very important for a new product, not just the season but the time to market in relation to a change in society. This is sometimes a problem - the product may be too early or too late.

Consumers can sometimes be ahead of the food manufacturers and sometimes it is the reverse. Consumers may have changed their life style or ideas, for example consumers were interested in the ingredients in foods and their nutritional values, but food manufacturers took some time to realise this and labelling regulations were introduced. Also they may have new cooking methods or/and appliances, for example the introduction of microwaveable food products lagged behind the introduction of microwave ovens.

Sometimes the food manufacturer can be ahead with some new technology and consumers cannot adapt their lifestyle or beliefs to accept it.

For example, food irradiation never became a widespread preservation method because of consumers' fears; vegetable protein products did not replace meat because of their low class image, and today, the introduction of genetically modified cereals in Europe because of consumer doubts.

Also there is a need to consider the time that people take to adopt a product, whether it is the factory staff, the salespersons, the retailers or the consumers. There is a learning curve and this needs to be factored in when planning product development projects.

There are five crucial aspects of diffusion which need to be considered when designing and marketing new products:

nature of the new product (raw materials, production, packaging, marketing);

communication about the new product;

social system and the place of the target consumer in the social system;

timing of the new product and of the consumer’s acceptance of it;

fit of the product to the current market culture.

In product improvement and me-too products, the barrier to innovation is that the consumers are often perfectly happy with the present product and do not want to make the change because they do not see that it has any other benefits that they want. So they have to be shown and convinced that there are new benefits so that they do not grow resistant not only to the product but the brand.

If it is a brand new product they may be suspicious, they may not see how they can use it, or they may not even want to change their cooking and eating habits for it.

The communication in this case needs to be educative, reducing unease and promoting ease of use. Recipes and cooking demonstrations are common methods of doing this.