Nutrisystem

“Our challenge was to bring a program to market that leveraged our strengths, but would allow us to broaden our consideration across key segments. By working with Concept Studio, we were able to effectively identify the optimal product and messaging attributes needed to accomplish that goal.”
- Tony Perlak
Senior Vice President, Marketing
Nutrisystem

Headquarters: Pennsylvania, USA
Target Market: USA
Optimization: Messaging

Igniting the Innovation Process with Concept Studio

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Consumers spend billions of dollars each year on weight loss initiatives. Seeking to launch a new program that would generate excitement and enthusiasm for the Nutrisystem brand, the company’s marketing team turned to Affinnova to maximize their ideation process and to optimize the best overall offering for their target audience.

CHALLENGE

For over 35 years, Nutrisystem has been at the forefront of the weight loss industry by offering quality foods, nutritionally balanced meal plans and individualized counseling. In 2011, the company sought to launch a new program with refreshed messaging and a compelling proposition including elements such as name, consumer insight, reason to believe, key features, benefits and imagery. Today, most innovation tools and processes limit the number of ideas that can be tested with consumers. This in turn limits creative and collaborative processes, as conventional research techniques offer no way to explore and manage millions of possible concepts

SOLUTION

To break these limitations, Nutrisystem turned to Affinnova’s innovation platform. The marketing team first used Concept Studio, Affinnova’s web-based concept management application, to develop a vast range of marketing concepts. Through Concept Studio’s user-friendly interface, the team explored variation across multiple elements while in a shared and secure online space for project management. This collaboration sparked even more ideas, enabling Nutrisystem to create an innovation space of over 73 million concepts. This entire space was then optimized by Affinnova’s evolutionary algorithm technology, IDDEA, in which consumers evolved the best ideas.

SUCCESS

From the total innovation space of more than 73 million, 4 distinct top concepts emerged, each with a unique theme. As a result of the optimization, the team learned what consumers preferred in the way of imagery, reason to believe, key features and benefits. They also learned which concepts had the greatest appeal among their target consumer segment, as well as which offered the greatest opportunity for attracting new consumer segments to the brand.