The recently rebranded FMI - The Food Industry Association has partnered with Accenture and Ernst & Young on two studies aimed at predicting future food industry and consumer trends.
Accenture focused on the new marketplace and how best to prepare for future consumer needs. The report, Tomorrow’s Food Marketplace – Creating Opportunities, outlines the following recommendations:
- Design a future that includes services, along with offerings, that are aligned to your brand purpose.
- Build short-term and long-term capabilities and strategies in parallel, waiting is not an option. Win on the basics immediately while building long term paths for success.
- Build internal infrastructure and re-organize organizational structure to align with brand purpose.
- The consumer will continue to change at an accelerated rate, build flexible technologies and capabilities to continuously adapt and adopt efficiently.
In its report, New Consumerism: Could Your Biggest Challenge Today Be How You Think About Tomorrow?, Ernst & Young noted that among 37 leading consumer product and retail companies surveyed, 75% of executive respondents from consumer product companies and 66% of respondents from retail companies indicate they are concerned with maintaining consumer relevance and that their traditional value-creation tactics are increasingly disrupted.
The report’s other findings include:
- While most major companies are taking steps to better understand and serve today’s consumer, not as many are considering the consumer of tomorrow.
- Although consumer products and retail companies are researching today’s consumer, there’s little understanding or governance around how to best create meaningful, actionable insights.
- Companies are struggling to use consumer insights to drive change in the market.
