Your launch didn’t fail. Your brief did.
Why most FMCG innovation underdelivers before the product reaches the shelf.
The post-mortem always says execution.
Most companies do not run post-mortems, for fear of starting an uncontrollable finger-pointing exercise. The ones who run post-mortems are so focused on shifting the blame to the bottom layers of the organisation that they never actually look at whether the strategy was working.
Distribution hit 85% of target. Trade support was in place. The media plan ran on schedule. The product was fine — tested well in concept, ticked the right boxes in the qual groups. And six months after launch, it sits in the dead zone: too slow to justify the investment, too recent to delist without someone losing face.
The team debrief runs through the usual explanations. Consumer communication wasn’t sharp enough. The trade activation was underfunded relative to the category leader. The timing was off by a quarter. Someone suggests the product needs a refresh.
None of that is what happened.
The problem started 18 months earlier, when someone wrote a brief that described the target consumer as “health-conscious adults, 28–45, above-average income, who value quality and convenience.” That description is statistically defensible, widely used, and commercially useless. It tells you who the person is. It tells you nothing about what they are doing when they need your product.
That brief produced a category-average product for a category-average segment. The launch performed accordingly.
The wrong question
Most FMCG innovation starts with a segmentation question: Who is our consumer?
What comes back is a persona. Demographics, attitudes, stated preferences, a name like “Sandra” or “Urban Alex”, and a stock photo. The brief gets built around that persona. Product design signals relevance to them. Pack architecture attracts their attention on the shelf. Media target the platforms they use.
None of this is wrong, exactly. But it organises the entire innovation effort around a description of a person at rest — not a person in motion, in a specific life context, trying to accomplish something specific.
Moreover, as Mark Ritson repeats very, very often, “you are not your customer.” Unfortunately, when we talk about personas, on the one hand, there is an idealisation process that creates a distance between the persona and what is really happening in the market. On the other hand, there is a self-mirroring effect among marketers who think of themselves as aspirational consumers and, in a way, transfer their thinking and wishes to these personas, becoming their customers.
The question that actually produces useful innovation briefs is different: What is this person trying to do right now: given where they are, what they’ve just come from, who they’re with, and what would make this moment feel resolved?
That question sounds obvious when you read it. It is almost never what the brief actually asks.
People don’t live in categories
This is the structural failure underneath most innovation theatre. Retailers are organised around categories. Therefore, the manufacturers align with their customers. So, FMCG companies are organised by category. So they build innovation that competes within categories, designed for segments that live within categories.
But consumers don’t live in categories. They live through moments.
Take non-alcoholic beer. The category spent years launching product after product at “health-conscious millennials reducing their alcohol intake.” Most of those launches underperformed. The category remained niche, positioned somewhere between compromise and punishment.
Heineken 0.0 took a different route, not by targeting a healthier segment, but by naming the occasions that segment-centric thinking had ignored entirely. The working lunch where alcohol isn’t appropriate. The designated driver at dinner. The training block where you want the social ritual without the recovery cost. These aren’t demographics. They are recurring life contexts with specific triggers, constraints, and desired outcomes. The competitive set in each of those moments isn’t other non-alc beers: it’s sparkling water, soft drinks, and opting out of the social moment entirely.
Same category. Different starting question. Completely different brief, different activation, different reason to exist.
The repeat purchase rate on Heineken 0.0 — the measure that indicates whether consumers found what they were actually looking for — outpaced most of the segment for years. Not because of better liquid or more media spend, but because the occasion logic was built into every commercial decision from the brief forward.
What changes when you start from the occasion
A Demand Space is a recurring life context where someone is trying to accomplish something specific. Not a demographic. Not a psychographic. A moment with a trigger, a constraint, an emotional tone, and a desired outcome.
When the brief starts from the Demand Space rather than the segment, three things shift immediately.
The competitive set becomes honest. You stop comparing your SKU to others in your category and start asking: what else could serve this moment? That question reveals white space that segment-centric analysis never surfaces, because your real competition often isn’t in your Nielsen database. The post-gym drink competes with protein bars, fast food, and nothing at all — not just other functional beverages.
The product design brief gets specific. A Demand Space has constraints — time pressure, social context, available formats, and price tolerance in that precise moment. Those constraints make the design choices that segmentation leaves ambiguous obvious. Format, portion, pack convenience, ease of opening while driving or sweating — these are defined by the occasion, not by a persona. The brief stops producing optionality and starts producing decisions.
The channel becomes precise. If the occasion is the post-gym moment, the product needs to be at the gym — at the point of need, visible when the decision happens. Not at a premium grocery targeted at the health-conscious segment, which is a different occasion entirely. Occasion logic tells you where to be, not just who to target.
This is not new thinking. The consumption rituals research that informs long-term brand equity reinforces it. What makes it persistently underused is that acting on it means reorganising the brief, the process, and eventually the portfolio around demand contexts rather than category hierarchies. That’s disruptive work. Writing a persona is an afternoon.
The test for your next brief
Take any live innovation brief in your pipeline right now. Find the section that describes the target consumer. Read it carefully.
Then ask one question: Can I describe, in a single sentence, the specific moment in this person’s actual daily life when they need this product — what just happened, where they are, who they’re with, and what resolution they’re looking for?
If you can’t answer that in one sentence, the brief is category-centric. The innovation will perform to category average. And the post-mortem, when it arrives, will blame execution.
The brief is the leverage point. Everything downstream — product, pack, channel, communication — is an expression of the brief. Get the demand context right first. Everything downstream gets easier, cheaper, and more likely to survive its second year.
What this means in practice
Fixing the brief doesn’t require a new research methodology or a six-month segmentation study. It requires one discipline: write a target occasion description before writing a target consumer description. Name the moment. Describe the trigger. Define the constraint. State what resolution looks like.
Then let that occasion definition drive the consumer profile — not the other way around.
Brands that grow consistently aren’t smarter about consumers. They’re more specific about contexts. That specificity shows up in every commercial decision they make.