Accelerating market launches: Opella’s AI-driven innovation
Opella CHC, leader in the Consumer Healthcare market, offers a wide range of over-the-counter products and vitamin & mineral supplements. The consumer healthcare landscape is rapidly changing, with both established players and new brands constantly launching new products. To maintain and grow its strong market position, Opella needed to accelerate its product innovation process. To expand its mass retail presence and streamline innovation, Opella collaborated with SparkOptimus to enhance their product development capabilities and significantly reduce the time from idea to market launch.
SparkOptimus helped us quickly identify and implement key AI-driven innovation insights that significantly reduced our product development timeline and boosting our prospects for success. Their pragmatic, results-focused approach enabled us to bring new products to market faster, reinforcing our competitive position in the VMS sector.
Processing large amounts of unstructured data, such as customer behaviour, purchasing trends, and consumer feedback, has traditionally been challenging. This made it difficult to identify and enter new product spaces. In today’s rapidly evolving consumer healthcare market, product innovation must move faster than the traditional annual cycle. This requires an agile approach for continuously tracking and assessing consumer needs.
To address this, we collaborated with local markets in Australia and Japan to develop a tool that combines multiple online data sources - such as Google Search trends and Amazon sales data - to better understand both the functional and emotional drivers of consumer behaviour. The tool uses Generative AI to analyse tens of thousands of search queries, product descriptions, and customer reviews, identifying what drives sales. It also evaluates key purchasing criteria and the claims of best-selling products in local markets, ensuring the recommendations are market-relevant, competitive, and aligned with Opella's brand portfolio.
Additionally, the tool's language-agnostic design enables it to run across markets, spotting cross-market opportunities and uncovering untapped areas for market entry.
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This process, already applied in France, Mexico, Spain, and the US for various Opella brands, has been scaled as a global starting point for product ideation. The resulting output allows Opella to not only identify but also anticipate emerging consumer needs, while immediately creating concrete product ideas based on the insights. Ensuring that new products are fully focused on covering consumer needs fosters greater market relevance, consumer satisfaction, and sales potential. Moreover, this new capability can significantly reduce the product ideation process for new products, allowing Opella to remain agile and responsive to market changes, effectively enhancing their competitive position in a changing consumer healthcare landscape.
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