Loved reading this story about how the magic happens in Taco Bell's Innovation Lab, The tenets for innovation are simple but clearly very effective - how to make things fast and how to make them delicious. To even get to the point there needs to be reason rooted in a consumer need.
Liz Matthews, chief food and beverage innovation officer at Taco Bell, says it all comes down to a problem, a hunch, or a common request from consumers. In research groups, consumers often said they liked putting potato chips in their sandwiches. Others said they loved the flavor of Doritos. It took some time before the dots connected and the Doritos Locos Taco was born.
“The biggest thing for us is to always be listening. Once you do that, things start to fall into place,” Matthews says. “We’re always listening to the consumer and always exploring and trying new things.”
The trick of listening at scale, parsing signal from noise to clarify the actual voice of customer is not a trivial process. If Taco Bell is rolling out hits, that process is clearly working. I remember talking to a prospective client a while back who led innovation for a similar fast food chain. They had very good instincts about their customer and were serving them well-enough but I did not get the sense they were doing such a good job of "always listening". It is no surprise, they delivered very few hits when they tried launching something novel. It is almost as if their customers questioned their motives as being something other than filling a need in a way that was fast and delicious. In light of that experience the Taco Bell success makes even more sense.
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