The majority of R&D leaders in the fast-moving consumer goods sector are carrying a similar set of significant, and rising business pressures. The expectation to deliver products that succeed commercially, not just technically, has intensified considerably in recent years. Speed to market has become a strategic imperative as development cycles that once stretched across years are increasingly measured in months. And the return on R&D investment, the measure of whether the scientific effort, resources, and time, are generating proportionate commercial outcomes, is one that boards and executive teams are asking with greater urgency and less patience than they used to. These are entirely reasonable expectations, and they point toward a single underlying challenge: how do you consistently develop breakthrough products that land with real impact in market, rather than products that are technically accomplished, but potentially commercially underwhelming?
The answer, in our experience, lies beyond the science. R&D teams in FMCG are extraordinarily capable, and the work they produce frequently reflects that. The products are often well-formulated, the manufacturing science is well specified, and the technical rigour that goes into development is impressive. Teams tend to understand their products with real precision, yet what tends to receive less systemic attention is the person those products are designed for, especially with respect to the deeper, highly specific qualitative understanding of their life, their motivations, and the specific moments where a new product could make a difference.
Consumer understanding, in many innovation processes, exists at the level of broad demographic profiling and category-level behavioral data, which gives teams a starting point, but nowhere near the specificity required to guide the kind of granular product decisions that determine whether a product will really resonate with a real person in a typical everyday moment of their life. Without that depth and specificity, teams are formulating in the dark. And when the abstraction turns out to not reflect what consumers actually need, the result is rework: reformulations, revised briefs, delayed timelines, and inflated development cycles due to lack of target definition and deep target understanding.
Deeper user understanding changes what is possible at every stage of development. When R&D teams have genuinely granular insight into their target consumer, their motivations, the workarounds they have developed, what a genuinely better product would mean in the context of their actual life, the work that follows is significantly more specific, more evidence-based, and more commercially grounded. That specificity is what allows teams to build Ideal Product Models that are coherent from consumer insight all the way through to technical brief, and Product Stories that articulate exactly what a product does and, more importantly, why it matters to the person it was designed for, in terms that actively guide development decisions rather than simply describing them after the fact.
The commercial consequences of that specificity, when it is present, are measurable, and so are the consequences of its absence. Euromonitor International’s AI-powered NPD tracking platform found that 25 percent of new product launches tracked across key FMCG categories and markets in 2023 and 2024 were inactive by the end of 2024, a quarter of the industry’s innovation effort disappearing from shelves within two years of launch. NielsenIQ’s January 2026 analysis of Western European FMCG performance adds a further dimension: innovation unit sales fell by 5.8 percent across the region in 2025, even as total category value grew, a pattern which NielsenIQ describes as “a widening disconnect between what manufacturers launch and what shoppers actually choose to buy.” The reasons for that failure, across the cases we have seen and in the broader industry data, are overwhelmingly user-based: the science is often sound, and the formulation competent, yet the failure is one of commercial relevance, of products arriving in market without a precise enough understanding of the person they were built for, or the moment in their life where the product was supposed to fit.
What the Lab Gets Right, and What Gets Left Out
The structural conditions that produced this gap are entirely understandable, and worth saying clearly, because this is not a conversation about what R&D teams are doing wrong. R&D has historically been evaluated on technical rigour and scientific precision, and those are qualities worth having and protecting. The challenge is that technical precision applied to the wrong question generates impressive work that fails to land, and when consumer understanding is only positioned as something that bookends a development process, informing the brief at the beginning, and validating the concept before launch, it becomes disconnected from the thousands of technical decisions made in between: the formulation choices, the sensory profile decisions, the texture and efficacy trade-offs that collectively determine whether a product will really resonate with the people it was designed for.
By the time many development processes bring consumer insight back into the room, the fundamental architecture of the product has already been set. The insight is being used to validate a direction rather than to shape it, and when the consumer understanding that would have changed the direction arrives too late to change anything, it has stopped functioning as insight and started functioning as a problem. Deloitte’s 2026 Global Consumer Products Outlook, drawing on a survey of 300 senior executives across the industry, found that approximately half of organisations are now actively rationalising their product portfolios specifically to “stay closer to evolving consumer needs,” a finding that suggests widespread recognition, at the most senior levels, that the current approach to development is not keeping pace with the people it is supposed to serve.
The Andrex Question
One of the most commercially significant pieces of work we have been involved in was the development of Andrex Classic Clean, a breakthrough toilet tissue texture that was developed entirely from deep consumer understanding. The technical challenge was considerable, and the solution was achievable with considerably more efficiency than is typical in that category, because the Ideal Product Model was exceptionally precise. That precision had come from spending genuine time with real people, understanding what they said about toilet tissue when asked directly, and equally what they noticed without being asked, what quietly frustrated them, what a genuinely better experience would mean in the context of their actual life. The scientists had a very specific job to do, and they knew exactly what success looked like from the consumer’s point of view before they began detailed prototyping.
That clarity is worth more to an R&D team than most organisations recognise, and it also, for what it is worth, makes the science more interesting. The most engaged we have ever seen a development team is when they genuinely understand the person they are solving for, when the person they are solving for has arrived in the development process as a specific, well-understood individual, with genuine needs and genuine context, present from the very first conversation. The curiosity that drives rigorous science and the curiosity that drives rigorous consumer understanding are the same quality, pointed in different directions. What we find consistently, working across food, beverage, personal care, and household categories, is that once scientists begin spending real time with real people, any resistance that existed at the start of that process tends to dissolve extremely quickly.
Building the Capability to Translate
This mindset is important, but it will not sustain itself without real capability built behind it. By capability, we mean the practical frameworks and working habits that allow a team to bring consumer intelligence into their technical decision-making consistently, across the full development process, not just at kick-off and not just before a stage-gate.
The specific skill that tends to be most absent, and most valuable, is what we would describe as technical translation: the ability to take a qualitative consumer insight and convert it into a precise product requirement.
The specific skill that tends to be most absent, and most valuable, is what we would describe as technical translation: the ability to take a qualitative consumer insight and convert it into a precise product requirement. A scientist cannot formulate against an ambiguous feeling, they can formulate against a specific sensory performance guardrail, a functional outcome that research has established as the point at which a product moves from acceptable to genuinely preferred, a texture characteristic that a consumer has described needing and that can be mapped against a measurable technical variable. The step between consumer insight and technical brief is where an enormous amount of value is either created or lost, and it requires someone who can move fluently between the consumer world and the technical world without losing precision in either direction.
One framework we use at Untapped with R&D teams is the Product Story: a four-chapter structure that casts the user as the hero and the product as what gives them the capability to solve their most pressing problem. Moving through user wish, root cause, breakthrough technology, and new user experience in that order forces a discipline that is easily lost under development pressure: the discipline of asking whether what we are building still speaks directly to the person it was designed for, at the moment in their life where it is supposed to matter.
Teams that work with this structure consistently find that it prevents the premature convergence that plagues development programs, the pull toward the “loudest” idea in the room rather than the most commercially grounded one, and it keeps the consumer present in technical conversations where they can very easily become invisible. It also builds the habit of checking orientation through the development cycle, rather than only at its edges. McKinsey’s 2025 State of the Consumer report made the point plainly: consumer sentiment and consumer spending are no longer reliably correlated, and “simple methods for predicting consumer behavior are insufficient.” Companies, McKinsey argued, need to build what they described as a 360-degree view of their consumers, one that enables proactive decision-making rather than reactive adjustment. For R&D teams, the implication is that the consumer understanding embedded at the start of a development programme has a shelf life, and needs to be revisited as the work progresses, rather than treated as a fixed input that guided the brief and can now be set aside.
The Numbers, Made Plain
There is a strong commercial argument for investing in this kind of capability, and it is worth making it plainly, because R&D budgets are under sustained pressure and everything needs to justify its place at the table. Harvard Business Review’s September 2025 analysis of customer-centric organisations found that leaders in customer experience achieve more than double the revenue growth of their less customer-focused peers, citing McKinsey research on the relationship between customer orientation and financial performance. That finding is rooted in cross-sector data, but it maps directly onto what we observe within FMCG R&D: when consumer understanding is embedded in development from the earliest stage, concepts are built on a more solid foundation of genuine consumer need rather than internal assumptions about what consumers probably want, and the commercial outcomes reflect that difference.
Stage-gate success rates improve because the brief is better. Time to validated prototype shortens because teams are not cycling back through reformulations to correct for consumer responses that a better-informed brief would have anticipated. And launch performance improves because products arrive in market with a clear and well-understood reason to exist, for a specific person, in a specific context, rather than a broad appeal that in practice appeals to nobody in particular. NielsenIQ’s 2026 analysis concluded that “winning will require manufacturers to reset, refocus, and rebuild innovation around the consumer rather than the calendar” – a framing that captures exactly the reorientation that embedding user-centric frameworks is designed to produce.
The honest answer to whether this is achievable across a typical R&D team, without the sustained involvement of external resource, is yes, with the right frameworks and the right initial support, and usually faster than people expect. The aim is a sustainable uplift in how a team thinks about and works with consumer understanding, embedded into the way they develop products and available to the team whether or not external support is in the room.
A Question Worth Holding
For R&D directors and innovation leaders, the implication is structural as it means ensuring that meaningful consumer understanding is resourced close enough or ideally within R&D to genuinely influence technical decisions, operating inside the development process from the earliest stages, with enough iterative continuity to be revisited as the work progresses, rather than living in an insights function that reports to different commercial objectives and arrives at different points in the timeline. It means giving scientists the frameworks to engage with consumer understanding as a discipline in its own right, applied with the same care and rigour they bring to formulation or materials science. Harvard Business Review’s 2025 playbook on building customer-centric organisations identified dismantling organisational silos, and aligning a shared view of the customer across teams, as the foundational structural requirement for any organisation that wants customer-centricity to translate into actual commercial performance, rather than remaining an aspiration stated in strategy documents and quietly forgotten during a development sprint.
The critical leadership element is the willingness to hold, and to insist on holding, the question of who this is for alongside the question of whether it is technically excellent. Those two questions are entirely compatible, and the teams that ask both, consistently and with genuine rigor, tend to produce the kind of work that changes a company’s commercial fortunes, products that are scientifically strong and that land with great precision for the right person, at exactly the right moment in their life.
The gap between what R&D can produce and what consumers will genuinely respond to is critical for future business success. The technical capability is often already in place, and the question is whether it is pointed at the right problem, for the right person, in the right moment.
Deirdre Walters is the Founder of Untapped Innovation and Co-author of Untapping Innovation: An R&D Playbook for Products and Stories that Sell. Untapped Innovation works with FMCG R&D teams to embed deep consumer understanding into product development practice.
Featured image by Ryutaro Uozumi on Unsplash
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