IN A NUTSHELL
type
family business
length / size
14 weeks / 10 people working on client side
scope
Belgium
INNOVATION
Consumer profiling
Data-informed personas
Set-up for agile innovation
Design Thinking
Co-creation (Hackathon)
PARTNERS
Diana Coulson
Vandemoortele, a leading consumer brand in Belgium, called on beez to explore new ways to innovate quickly and more efficiently. In just 14 weeks, Vandemoortele had a complete 8-quarter innovation funnel and a set of successful new product launches ahead.
Vandemoortele is a well-known and appreciated brand in Belgium. Vandemoortele range architecture is organized around 3 strong pillars: frying oils, culinary oils and vinaigrettes. One of the brand objectives is to improve its innovation success rate on the market.
Alice Robberechts, marketing manager retail since March 2015 and Philip Duyck, Belgium commercial director since October 2016 reached out to beez in May 2018 to explore new ways to innovate quickly and more efficiently. More specifically, the aim was to fill the innovation pipeline with many future-proof innovation concepts in line with the brand’s positioning and the identified consumer personas.
beez proposed to work with its consumer-centric Design Thinking method.
Reframe
beez collected all of Vandemoortele’s brand documents and reframed the challenge with the Vandemoortele team on 15 June. All relevant information was then summarised by beez in a pre-reading document for the first hackathon.
beez organised a 1-day persona & insights hackathon on 26 June. 11 managers and directors joined. They represented all the departments involved to make innovation a greater success: marketing, trade marketing, market research, sales & R&D. Diana Coulson joined as a consumer insight expert.
In the morning, the team brainstormed in two sub-groups to describe different consumer personas of Vandemoortele products. In the afternoon, the same sub-groups came up with consumer insights based on these personas. The divergence sessions produced a lot of new insights.
In the evening, the team regrouped again to select the most valuable insights (convergence session). At the end of the day, the participants agreed to further build on the 13 relevant consumer insights identified during the first hackathon while focusing on 4 main personas during the next meeting.
The following day, beez compiled and shared the wrap-up of the first hackathon. Later, on 4 July, beez facilitated a conference call with the Vandemoortele team to discuss the hackathon output and agree on next steps.
Create
beez organised a 1-day ideate hackathon on 12 July. Again all the key departments were represented: marketing, trade marketing, market research, sales, packaging and R&D.
In the morning, the team worked in two sub-groups through several divergence sessions to produce as many ideas as possible. In the afternoon, the team went through convergence sessions to evaluate them and structure them into concept matrices. The day ended with 25 new products or sub-range concepts.
The following day, beez compiled the hackathon wrap-up and a follow-up call took place with the Vandemoortele team on 17 July to discuss the hackathon output and next steps.
beez organised a final 1-day prototype hackathon on 31 July with eight participants. This time, the two sub-groups had distinct assignments: the first group worked on business prototyping and the second on product prototyping. At the end of the day, Vandemoortele had designed and made six prototypes to be further developed in 2019.
Outcome
The next day, beez compiled the final hackathon wrap-up, and a follow-up call took place to complete the mission on 13 August. In just 14 weeks, Vandemoortele had a clear roadmap with strong innovation prototypes for the coming five years.
The first innovation – a range of mayonnaises – hit the shelves in Belgium in 2019, and it was a very successful launch.
