WindFall PRD
Product requirements document
The Problem
All consumers exhibit some level of neophobia. As a result, consumers almost never buy packaged food products they haven't tasted before. This pigeonholes consumer packaged good (CPG) brands into distributing their products via sampling tables. These tables, while currently the best customer acquisition tool on the market, don't sufficiently generate brands enough purchasing customers (see economics). The CPG industry is a brutal high volume low margin game that's notoriously difficult to break into because of the unavoidable need for brands to quickly acquire waves of new customers who will repeatedly purchase their product. Although new CPG products almost all offer differentiated value compared to their cheaper big box competitors, consumers can't reliably confirm a product is right for them before trialing it. As a result, 85% of new CPG brands die off within their first year of doing business. The problem isn't that these brands have bad products, it's that there's currently no solution effective enough at getting products in the mouths of affluent consumers who can start generating substantial life-time value for the brand immediately. The vast majority of CPGs must target affluent consumers who're willing to pay a premium for a differentiated product. Affluent consumers skew towards older demographics who on average, exhibit higher levels of food neophobia relative to younger populations. Sampling tables aren't designed to target these older, affluent consumers; they're designed to generate mass amounts of random traffic, mainly composed of freebie hunters at mainstream grocery stores like Costco.
The Solution
Surgically target affluent consumers at expensive locally-owned grocery stores continuously at specific times of the day, such as the cluster of Roncesville local grocery stores in Toronto between 9am-2pm between. Time of day is an integral security layer needed to filter out less affluent shoppers and ensure high ROI for CPGs, who for the first time in history, will be autonomously distributing their full-sized food products right off the shelf to these affluent consumers for free. (see economics)
Giving away a full-sized premium product is an extremely volatile, dangerous customer acquisition method that must solve several of its own problems - the most important of which is brand erosion. The consumer cannot simply walk away with a full-sized product; they must inherently tie it to a unique, iconic memory that meets or exceeds the value of the product. This experiential marketing tactic must instantaneously elicit a dopaminergic reaction in as many affluent, older consumers as possible before they leave the store. This is where WindFall, the local grocery store robot unicorn comes into play.
As shown by countless videogame implementations (i.e. Nintendo's Nintendogs, tamagotchis, etc) as well as academic research papers, interacting with virtual animals is a delightful, memorable experience for the majority of consumers. The key is to use this virtual animal NOT only as a dopamine lever, but to seamlessly design the user flow around it in a way that intuitively speeds up the transfer of the full-sized free product into the hands of the consumer. This is possible thanks to Apple's newly released app clip infrastructure.
The user notices an interesting new product then enters into the flow by scanning an app clip code located directly underneath the product's price tag. This promotion is designed to only run on new products first introduced into the retailers product mix for 1-week. This is to prevent shoppers from paying full price then returning to the store and seeing the product is now being offered for free. It is also only available 1-time to each customer.
At the store's physical checkout, the user scans their free product ticket directly into the retailer's POS by feeding the virtual robot unicorn a carrot. To differentiate from mass market NFC tap flows, WindFall uses active load modulation (ALM) hardware to increase read range & allow users to interact with their phones from up to 10cm away. Even if the user closes the app clip, thanks to local app caching, they do not have to re-open it to redeem their ticket at the cashier.
WindFall can integrate with virtually any POS that runs on Windows, Mac, or Linux. When the user scans their ticket (i.e. feeds WindFall a carrot), server-side virtual keystrokes are injected directly into the POS, which mimic the action of the cashier scanning a traditional barcode or coupon code with USB hardware.
WindFall is smaller than a chocolate bar, requires little integration overhead, and gives autonomous control over when the promotion is active. To maintain exclusivity to affluent consumers, WindFall automatically turns off at 2pm and only runs Monday-Friday.
Economics
WindFall is cheaper than paying a marketing agency to run a sampling service, who will typically charge ~$800 CAD per 8 hours.
Assuming the local grocery store gets a new customer every minute and 1/5 customers take a sample, the average cost per sample distributed is $8.33 (NOT including any product costs)
Assuming the brand's manufacturing COGS is ~30-50% of MSRP, giving away one $10 box of artisan crackers costs the brand $3-$5.
Bringing WindFall to Market
Because of WindFall's disruptive model, it needs to be taken to market carefully using organic traction to establish credibility. The mission of WindFall is to strengthen the longevity of the grocery sector by galvanizing innovation, a message that can be tied directly to the negative PR surrounding grocery corporations. WindFall's brand pillars are boldness, serendipity,and playfulness. As such, educating users about the grocery industry instead of naively villainizing big corporations is an integral part of this mission - and is the reason the founders built WindFall in the first place.
Sell-Through Uplift: the North Star metric
Create a test group of affluent shoppers at 1 premium retailer by distributing 100 free product boxes. Monitor sell-through for 1 month following the distribution of these free boxes.
Compare sell-through of the same product to a control group of affluent shoppers at a different premium retailer who has not been given the product for free.
Normalize transaction volume then compare the sell-through rates between the control and test groups to determine the effectiveness of distributing the 100 free products directly off the shelf at premium retailers.
