The Hershey Company is responsible for some of the world’s favorite sweet treats.

With a portfolio of well-established brands in well-established categories, Hershey’s needs to identify opportunities to use innovation to drive incremental volume growth and grow penetration. The Hershey’s team wants to be hands-on with the data, which is enabled through Dig Insight’s suite of tools.

To understand which innovations have the ability to drive incremental growth, the Hershey’s team uses Upsiide’s Market Simulator.

We first run an idea screen on the Upsiide platform that tests in-market products, potential products, and competitive products. Market Simulator models the data, forecasting share of choice, source of volume and incrementality for each innovation. We identify which in-market products (Hershey and competitive) each innovation will source volume from. Knowing share of choice allows Hershey to focus on innovations that drive high demand.

Knowing the source of volume ensures that Hershey is launching innovations that grow their share and don’t simply cannibalize their existing business.

Market Simulator is supplemented with TURF modeling of the Upsiide Idea Screen Data. TURF modeling identifies the combinations of products that most efficiently maximize potential penetration. Across hundreds of simulations, we identify products that are must have, nice to have and optional to the portfolio.Bringing together TURF and Market Simulator ensures a portfolio that maximizes penetration growth and share growth. 

Innovation is much more than new brands. It includes all of the changes that companies bring to market.

Hershey’s recently launched a new package format. They needed to understand which brands are the optimal fit for that format. Upsiide was used to identify brands that are an optimal fit with the package format. Additionally, the Upsiide Idea Screen data was modeled and visualized to build a brand interaction map. This map identified segments of brands that appeal to the same consumer cohorts. This map enabled Hershey to build a portfolio of brands in this new package format that appeal to a range of different consumer cohorts.

Dig Insights works in partnership with The Hershey Company to understand consumer motivations, analyze their portfolio mix, and discover new opportunities for market expansion. Our work together spans almost a decade and we bring multiple tech solutions to the table to get closer to consumers and drive business growth.

Our work has included running TURF analysis to understand potential reach for new offerings, conducting market simulations to understand incrementality, and leveraging Upsiide to understand the potential of innovation ideas vs. existing in-market products.

The partnership between Hershey’s and Dig Insights allows their teams to:

1. Understand consumer willingness to trade up or spend more on products
2. Discover how cannibalistic new innovations might be to their existing portfolio and identify innovations that drive incremental growth
3. Gain further context to their research, which helps them answer the age-old internal question “is that a good score?”