The Invisible Strategy Behind Beauty & CPG Product Development is vetting, which requires three capabilities that remain active throughout product development.
Start here with the third capability — Anticipation.
This reading guide walks through how to anticipate the foreseeable implications of decisions throughout product development.
Anticipating Builds Strategic Foresight
Moving forward in product development requires anticipating the foreseeable implications of decisions being made today. Experienced teams appear to be thinking ahead because they are drawing from accumulated knowledge of interdependencies and consequences.
Strategic anticipation is the active ability to perceive and analyze future implications and potential disruptions in the present. It allows teams to challenge assumptions, pressure-test what they are building, and understand what may need to be accounted for before those implications become harder to address.
That anticipation strengthens strategic foresight. As the knowledge base continues to evolve, teams can build a more comprehensive view of the foreseeable future for the product and business and use that understanding to inform present-day decisions.
Consumer Perception is a Designable System
The Problem:
- You know what you want the product to mean, but you’re unsure whether consumers will perceive it the way you intend.
Read This to Understand:
- How the hierarchy of perception can help you anticipate and design the path between what the product is intended to mean and how consumers may perceive it.
Key Takeaway:
- You cannot control consumer perception, but you can design the conditions that influence how the product is perceived.
Why It Matters for Vetting:
- The product itself communicates. Anticipating how consumers may perceive the product helps identify assumptions that need to be investigated during product validation and considered as the product is developed.
The Beauty & CPG Playbook for Pressure-Testing Innovation
The Problem:
- Your product contains something new or innovative, but you need to understand whether that innovation creates enough value for consumers to adopt it.
Read This to Understand:
- How different forms of innovation can accumulate within a product and how to evaluate whether they collectively create something consumers can understand, value, and adopt.
Key Takeaway:
- A product can contain multiple forms of innovation, but newness only matters when those forms of innovation create recognizable consumer value.
Why It Matters for Vetting:
- Identifying the forms of innovation within the product helps teams determine what consumers would need to value and what assumptions should be pressure-tested throughout product development.
The Brand Promise Is a Product Constraint (Not Just a Marketing Message)
The Problem:
- The product makes sense for the brand, but you’re trying to determine whether developing it will actually strengthen what the brand is known for.
Read This to Understand:
- How the brand promise can function as a product development constraint for evaluating whether a product strengthens what the brand is committed to delivering.
Key Takeaway:
- A product that makes sense for the brand is not necessarily the same product that strengthens it.
Why It Matters for Vetting:
- Evaluating products against the brand promise helps determine whether it will reinforce what the brand is known for or simply add another SKU to the portfolio.
The Paradox of Transparency in Beauty & CPG Product Development
The Problem:
- You’re deciding how transparent to be about the product and need to understand what sharing may require the brand to explain or prove.
Read This to Understand:
- How transparency changes the conditions of exposure around a product and why the underlying consumer need for confidence should inform what the brand chooses to reveal.
Key Takeaway:
- More transparency does not automatically create more confidence. The decision is determining what consumers need to know to feel confident and ensure that what consumers need to believe is integrated throughout the product, so they do not have to reverse-engineer whether it deserves their trust.
Why It Matters for Vetting:
- Deciding what the brand is willing to expose helps teams anticipate the questions, expectations, and evidence the product may need to support before those requirements become part of its market narrative.
The Strategic Cost of “We’ll Figure It Out Later”
The Problem:
- You’ve decided to develop the product and have a vision for what it could become. Now you need to understand what that vision will actually require before those decisions become expensive to change.
Read This to Understand:
- How a product creates technical, operational, consumer, and commercial requirements, and why identifying them while you still have flexibility changes the product development process.
Key Takeaway:
- Every product decision creates adjacent requirements. The earlier you understand those interdependencies, the more choices you have in how to address them.
Why It Matters for Vetting:
- Identifying foreseeable requirements early helps teams account for them while changes are easier and less expensive to make, reducing the likelihood that an avoidable constraint becomes a downstream product development problem.
As brand, consumer, and market dynamics evolve, these three capabilities strengthen the ability to make decisions that support business growth, innovation, and long-term planning across product development and business operations.
The knowledge accumulated throughout becomes a reference point that continues to evolve as a strategic source of truth.
—by THE BUILD BRIEF