Tips for landing successful seasonal innovation

Welcome to Innovation Spotlight! For this edition, we’ll be taking a break from our regular spotlight of remarkable product innovation to talk about successful seasonal innovation.

Whether you’re in your local grocery store, Starbucks, Home Depot or even your own neighborhood, you can’t miss that we’re in the Halloween season.?

And with a new season comes new seasonal products. It’s the most exciting part of any new season for us at Zappi!?

Over the years we’ve done a lot of research on seasonal innovation. And a number of similar themes kept emerging.?

So for this month’s Innovation Spotlight, we wanted to offer our tips to help you create successful innovation based on all we’ve learned from our research.?

This is just part of our analysis, check out the full guide for the rest!

1. Make small tweaks to core products?

Season after season, we see the most successful products are the ones that make minor tweaks to existing products. Brands that take an existing product that consumers already love and make a seasonally relevant change to its color, shape or packaging tend to see the best results.?

Think Reese’s Peanut Butter Pumpkins for Halloween, Hershey’s Kisses Santa Hats for Christmas and M&M’s pastel colored eggs for Easter.

You can see it in this chart below: The “enhanced core products” we analyzed across seasons tend to fall in the “short-term trial” quadrant of our chart — which is exactly what we want to see from a limited-time product. These products have high trial potential. They may not always be particularly breakthrough ideas, but they do make it into consumers’ shopping carts.

Reese’s has seen particular success with this approach. Across all seasons, Reese’s seasonal shapes were top-performing products. They maintained the formula of the much-loved cups, honoring that “less is more” approach.?

And we featured them in this newsletter a few months ago for their Olympics-themed peanut butter cups. It’s a formula that keeps working for them!

While this is most often the path to success, it’s important for you to do consumer research to understand which seasonal tweaks fit with your own existing products.?

2. Play in your lane

It doesn’t make sense for every category to produce a new innovation for every season. Consumers don’t always see the connection.

And if it doesn’t make sense for your brand, don’t force it. Your brand should maintain true category relevance for seasonal innovation to be effective.

Some categories or brands have a greater connection to particular seasons. For example, we’ve seen that chocolate brands have an advantage when credibly launching a Halloween, Christmas or Easter product. But categories like cereals and soft drinks aren’t easily viewed as a seasonal treat consumers enjoy.

(For more on our Trial and Breakthrough metrics plotted in the image above, read this blog .)

But more and more categories are getting in on seasonal innovation each year (these pumpkin spice Dude Wipes came out last year!) so what consumers accept from seasonal innovation is always evolving.

That’s why it’s so important to check in with consumers to make sure they think your concept fits with your brand and makes sense in the category.?

3. Target a broad audience

If you’re creating a limited-time innovation for what you know is likely a narrow audience (like those who enjoy black licorice flavors), you might want to reconsider.

It’s usually best to appeal to a broad audience for seasonal innovation. These products are only available for one season, so you want to sell as much as possible to recoup your investment. And if it only appeals to a small group, you’re limiting your ability to do that.

That means doing your research to understand what colors, flavors, etc. appeal to the largest group of people — as you can see in this winter flavor analysis we did. Hot cocoa emerged as almost universally liked, while gingerbread was more polarizing.

It’s worth it to do your research to understand what flavors consumers like — and which flavors they think fit with your brand — to make sure you’re reaching a broad group.

For more tips and analysis

Read “The ultimate guide to successful seasonal innovation” for more of our tips!??

And I recommend subscribing to this newsletter because in our next edition we’ll show how Zappi's AI Marketing Agents interpreted these seasonal tips to create a new seasonal concept ??

Until next time!?

Janine Klimko