The innovation framework: When to scale, pivot, or kill a new product

[MUSIC] Welcome to Talking Shop, the weekly podcast from retail sector. Each episode, we sit down with standout leaders and change makers from across retail to unpack the career decisions, turning points, and moments that shape them. We dig into what makes each guest unique, how they think, how they lead, and what they've learned along the way. Expect honest stories, real challenges, and practical lessons that you can apply to your own career and business. If you like the podcast, make sure to subscribe when your podcast platform is choice. And for more information, visit retailsector.co.uk or drop us a line at [email protected]. Hi, I'm your host Lewis, and on this episode of Talking Shop, I'm joined by Christo, marketing an innovation instructor at Pilgrims Food Europe. With a Chris spanning over 15 years at FMCG Giants like General Mills and Nomad Foods, Christ now oversees a portfolio including household names like Richmond and Fridge Raiders. Today, we examine the rigors R&D behind the new Fridge Raiders grills, to the theoretical frameworks for revitalising tired brands. We also discuss how to audit your most sacred brand assets, the evolving power dynamic between big brands and private labels, and the leadership non-negotiables required to keep a team focus when the retail landscape is shifting under their feet. Hi, Chris, welcome to Talking Shop. Thanks for joining us today. Thanks so much, Lewis, great to be here. So, yeah, if you could just start by walking us through your career, your journey, maybe memorable moments, challenges, anything like that, that'd be great. Yeah, so I've spent 15 years now in FMCG primarily in food. I did start out my career in the glue industry of all places, and then quickly made the switch into food. So I worked for Bertha Biscuits on Maryland Cookies for a while, then moved on to Bertha, then onto General Mills, working on Aldo Passo, and then I joined what was then the Kerry Foods business back in 2019, before we were then acquired by Pilgrims in 2021. So it's been a career mainly in food, mainly in marketing, a couple of little stints in sales and revenue management along the way, but mainly within that kind of brand management space. But I think the thing that's made it really interesting is the fact that the different companies have worked for, have all been in slightly different ownership structures, different categories, different brands and different life stages. So actually, although it's been a career primarily in food, it's felt very different at different points during my career, and I think each of those different experiences has taught me very different things, and has presented different challenges to me. I think in terms of memorable moments, it's probably two that really stand out to me. I think one was when I joined Bertha's Biscuit Company, so I was an assistant brand manager working on Maryland Cookies, and it was the first time we had worked for a really entrepreneurial fast pace, hands-on business, and it was somewhere that just gave you tons of ownership from day one. I think when you're starting out in your career and you're quite a young age doing that, it just makes you realise how possible it is to make an impact quite quickly, and the fact that you had leaders who were empowering you and giving you a lot of space to do what you believe was right, was hugely motivating. And I think it instilled a real sense of kind of conviction, and that sense of ownership in me from quite a young age, and that sense of need to drive commercial impact through marketing. That was really something that the business was keen for their marketing team to display. And then I think probably at the other end of the scale, the other memorable moment was probably at General Mills, so I went there back in 2017, and that was the first time I'd experienced a real matrix structure. That was a business that was global in scale. It had a very global, local operating model, and therefore you had to work really collaboratively across the matrix to make sure that you landed what you needed to in the local markets. It meant working with the global and regional teams, and having to influence and get your point across there, and navigate some of the complexity to get things over the line. And that was a real learning curve for me. I think it also meant that because you were much more of a specialist in the local market, you had to take real ownership of the local P&L, and that was the first time I'd really had to, in terms of the board meetings and the updates that we were doing on the monthly basis, it was all about the numbers. Whereas prior to that, it had been more balanced, whereas actually there you were running the commercial agenda in the marketing team, which was a completely different experience for me. Brilliant. It all sounds like exciting stuff. But what some of the projects and things you'd be working on in the marketing, would it be Brad Big Brand, TV campaigns, online e-commerce campaigns, would it be more designing or marketing, like packaging, things like that? What were some of the tasks involved? I mean, no days, the same as it. And I think that's what I love about marketing. It is the fact that you do sit at the centre of the organisation and you touch so many different functions. I mean, a Burton's, the first example I gave you, it was a case of, there was a very, very strong project management element. My role just based on kind of where I was in the marketing team at the time. So a lot of it was around getting innovation to market, artwork projects to market and so on. But then, as I progressed, I was very lucky to work for someone who was very commercially minded, was very keen to shine a spotlight on me, which was a really nice, really nice leadership trait, I think, from here. And it's something I've tried to bring forward in my own career as well. But I remember having to go up in front of the board and get a million pounds of capex, signed off. I was like, 23 years old. No idea what I was doing. It was incredibly varied in the sense that some of it was innovation, some of it was packaging. But then you also have to have big conversations on P&L's business cases in order to get capital sign off, for example. Yeah, it's a exciting stuff and a great way to start your career. It's being thrust into these situations and a big learning curve. But yeah, moving on to your role today at Pilgrims. Can you test a bit more about that? It's obviously leading teams and things like that nowadays. But what does that involve? And it really tests a bit more for the people, maybe out there that somehow don't know about the Pilgrims portfolio, what that entails and your work involved in that as well. Yeah, absolutely. So I'm the marketing innovation director at Pilgrims Europe, and that covers both UK and more recently Irish markets. And within the portfolio you've got brands like Richmond, Fidraders, Madison's, Denny over in Ireland. So it's a real nice mix of different brands in different categories, mainly protein based. So we've got meat and plant based options in there. And it's just shy of about half a billion pounds at retail sales value. The role covers everything from strategy through to in market execution. And as a result, within our marketing team we've got brand management, innovation, trade marketing, e-commerce, field sales. So it's a really nice mix of different parts of marketing, which means that you get to decide ultimately the future of where the brands are going and the best way to execute them in market. Yeah, it all sounds like a really fascinating stuff. And you say no day, no day, I'm a student, the same. Maybe recently can you tell us a bit of some of the projects you've worked on? I know it's been a bit of a repositioning or launching as well, with grills under the Fridrager's brand. What has that process been like? And you say, obviously it's been a successful one, but if you can tell us a bit more about it? Yeah, I think the role, Edits Courage, all about trying to drive growth of our brand of business. That's the crux of everything we're trying to do. So a lot of the things that we've been working on at pilgrims over the past couple of years, particularly in the brand aside of things, is how we take the brands into new spaces. So that might be new categories, new channels. But it's also about how we innovate and how we communicate to our consumers in the most compelling way. So we've done a lot of work over the last quarter where we've been launching new campaigns for the brands to make sure that they're just always remaining relevant and fresh. So we've had a lot of new work out on Richmond recently where we've been hearing the core product, the famous Richmond sausage and all the great things that that offers. We've also had new work go live recently on Fridraiders with a new campaign called Chicken for the Road, which is all about trying to position the brand as a really substantial snack, which helps you tackle anything that life throws at you when you might need something just to keep you going. So both of those campaigns have tested brilliantly and we're really confident that they're kind of long term creative platforms for us. I think in terms of skewers and the grill's platform more generally on Fridraiders, Fridraiders is an amazing brand. So it's about 130 million at retail. So it was value, it's 20 years old, so it's still quite a young brand. And interestingly, when you look at the penetration of the brand, 15% of the population are consuming it. So what's really exciting about that is that there's 85% of the population to go after there. And that's really what led to our thinking on skewers and the grill's platform. We were looking at how might we go after the people that aren't currently buying into the brand and the meat snacking category more generally. You know, I think as a brand, we've got a responsibility to not just grow our own brands, but also grow the category in general. That's a really important role for retailers. And when you look at it, actually there's a lot of people who maybe just have questions around, what do I do with this? It's a slightly new behaviour, meat snacking. And we also discovered as well that there were consumers who are looking for just a slightly different product experience to our core product, which as I say is 130 million. But there's a group of people who are looking for things that perhaps look a little bit more like whole philip products, perhaps a little bit less uniform, and something that feels a little bit more real. And so that's what led us to the insight around that. And we would go through quite a big ideation process to understand different ways in on that. We'd then work really collaboratively with the R&D team to make sure that we're delivering doing something against that brief. And that's really how we came up with two products, really under the grill, was range one with fillets, which were like pieces of chicken, and then also skewers as well. - Yeah, so what does that kind of process say look like from start to finish, you say you have these ideas, you know, there's so many of these consumers that we're not hitting at the moment, what are those reasons why even maybe going from that step to say to the final product, what does that look like even in time span and obviously the amount of work that's gone into that on the different stages? - Yeah, of course. I mean, someone wants it to be marketing because it's a bit like a iceberg. You can see the final product, but there's a ton of work underneath the surface, and I think that's really true. So I would say that it's probably a mix of quantitative and qualitative approaches to get you there. So we use a segmentation framework which would look at different consumer groups, and it's all based on attitudes and behaviors rather than demographics, and it would then plot it against occasions. And by doing that combination, you can then work out where is your brand particularly strong, and then also where some of the areas where your brand could be stronger. And that was really the heart of getting to the skewer's proposition. It was to say actually there's this group of consumers in this type of occasion who aren't currently buying a product, but offer a really sizable market for us to go after. And it was then about drilling into that group to say what are some of the things that they're looking for? What are we not delivering for them? And from that, we can then start getting some of the ammunition that we need to go into ideation. Hmm. For terms of, let's say, come up with the idea and then what that's going to look like, how much more goes into that, into terms of finding, you say, they're looking for fillets rather than some other form, or say the skewers, and then even the sizing, what deems that as a snack compared to like other things, how does that come into it? And is it getting, is it the testing then different? Is it what people would assume? Is it kind of focus groups? Is it more advanced than that? What's that process like? So we would do quite a lot of ethnographic research. We do sometimes do focus groups, but I think sometimes the challenge with that is that it's not necessarily representative of how consumers are actually behaving in real life. So we would typically do ethnographic research where we would either accompany people on a shop, we would go into their homes and actually see how they are behaving in particular, meal times, and how they're also consuming products. And that would then give us a much more representative view of actually what we need to do. And we would then go into concept screening as well. So we would put forward a few different ways in to address that problem. And we would then get a more of a quantitative view on this idea resonates more than this one, et cetera. And it would give us a bit more direction so that when we go to brief it into our R&D team, we've got some really clear things that we need to do in order to deliver against that. And then it's really collaborative, I would say, as a business. And other businesses have worked in as well. It's marketing can't do everything on their own. You've got to work with other functions to make these things happen. So that relationship with R&D is critical because they're the experts in the technology and the flavor trends and so on. So getting their expertise early on is really important. And then it's working with our commercial teams as well to make sure that the pack size is correct, the price point, the promotional mechanics. All of this stuff has got to work in harmony in order to make sure that the proposition is executed brilliantly as well. - Well, this is kind of a silver bullet kind of question. But what is the secret to finding that harmony is to say is that all teams being involved in the process to hold along rather than just coming together and kind of compartmentalizing and then finding the final form. What's the way of, say, trying to make that as harmonious as possible? - It's a really good question. I would say I'm a believer in getting people's involvement up front as much as possible. And being curious, I think sometimes there's a tendency to feel like you've got to be the expert and you've got to have all the answers. And actually by listening to people, by consulting different departments, you get to a way better outcome. There should be no feeling of, I need to know all of this or I'm the expert or the person that's got to have all the answers. I think if you leave that at the door and you bring people into your world and you're clear that actually you're trying to get to the same place, the outcome is always fast-donger. So it's about being curious and just open to different opinions. - Yeah. I'm curious to ask in terms of timings to these things, how do you know when's it say when's the right time to go after that, are the 85% that weren't currently consuming for ages at the time or when's it better and to considerate kind of what you have, make sure the kind of core product is in the right place it needs to be. What necessarily are some of those indicators that again now is a good time for us to look further and what kind of plays into that? - I think really the answer is, if your core business is in a strong position, you can then innovate more successfully from it. If the core is very wobbly, then that really needs to be your immediate focus before you start chasing after new and shiny things. I think probably as marketers, we can sometimes default to the new and different, which is why innovation suddenly feels quite exciting because it's tangible and it's new and you can go after it and make it happen whereas actually the harder bit actually is about making what you've already got work, aren't there? That's really the biggest challenge and that's where some of that segmentation framework is really useful because you can look at it and say, actually we've got an area here where maybe we're not quite as strong but that's just because we're not communicating it in a particular way. And actually if we were to activate against this type of message, we can do that. We can reposition our core in a slightly different way so you don't need to necessarily embark on a ton of innovation to address that. So I think it's just making sure that you've got a lot of different levers at your disposal. Innovation is one of them. But then as you say, there might be other avenues to drive growth from your core a bit harder. - When you've got, you mentioned that Fridrages quite a young brand, I'm sure it's others in a portfolio that are much older than and more established. When it comes to a point where you're evaluating whether they're, you know, what's deemed as this is a classic kind of brand establishment that's by as it always going to be coming back to and it or on the other flip side of it becoming a bit older and maybe a bit tired in the market comparatively. How do you know which one's kind of an established classic and which one needs a bit of revitalising? Obviously I'm sure it's outwardly the simple question maybe in the sales figures. But in terms of if there's been no real deviance but there maybe there's more up and coming challenges on the market. How do you discern what's a classic to stay and what needs kind of a say freshening up a bit? Are there certain indicators again? Is that running it through, say, different kind of tests and kind of consumer research and finding that? How do you go about that? - I think the main thing is around relevance. So I think as you say, there's a bit of a distinction between a classic brand and a tired brand. So I would say that it's whether the brand is still relevant in the eyes of your consumers. So many examples, you know, they're a bit cliche now but things like blockbusters, wallwurts, you know, the brands that have perhaps been so entrenched in their way of doing things that they then become completely irrelevant and tired. And I think, you know, if that's the case then they will not be around in the long term. So it's about making sure that you don't fall into that trap. You know, I've been lucky enough to work on some brands that have got tons of heritage and real legacy and they've been here before me and they'll be here after me as well. But I think you've got to, you know, the good thing about these brands is that they've got tons of trust and people who are aware of them and they've got really strong, deep associations with them, you know, from childhood and some instances. But if you are constrained by the past and if you are so focused on protecting what is there today, I think you sometimes lose sight of reducing those shackles and moving them forward. And if they don't move forward, they will become tired and they will then eventually decline and die. So I think a really good example of where we've moved things on is on Richmond, for example, where we repositioned it a couple of years back to move from being the nation's favorite sausage brand to become the nation's favorite meal time brand. And that suddenly opened up an entire new world for us beyond what we thought was possible. And that's an example where, you know, we didn't throw the baby out with the bath water there. We sausages are still a really, really important part of what we do. But it just made us think a little bit bigger around what else the brand could achieve. And it's allowed us to stretch into new categories, new channels to activate in a slightly different way and to change our messaging into something that's far more emotional rather than, you know, to product focused. - Mm-hmm. Is it easier than to slightly alter the primary offerings of sausages without it then looking like a major change or out of place because it's alongside, say, all these different products that now have been opened under the kind of Richmond brand? Does that make it a bit easier? So even if you're just tweaking small things on the sausage, but as it's part of a larger campaign, it kind of doesn't go as it's not as stark a difference to the consumers that would think, oh, you know, maybe not even recognize it, because it's part of a bigger brand campaign. It's maybe a bit more palatable. [BLANK_AUDIO] or anything to that? One of the things we found actually when we launched Meet Free under the Richmond brand was that people who were entering the brand through that particular category, they had a more positive view of the brand in general. So it had a really good halo effect on, of course. So I think it absolutely talks to what you were saying there. The big shift that we tried to make from a comms point of view is to lift ourselves up above the individual categories. So rather than just talking about sausages or just talking about Meet Free, for example, we started talking about the emotional feeling that the brand gives you and that the emotional benefits that we offer. So the campaign that we went out with was called Good Times. And that talks about those feelings of belonging, comfort, togetherness, which consumers are looking for and which Richmond is uniquely placed to deliver in that particular category. And that suddenly, regardless of whether you're selling sausages or bacon or Meet Snacking products, that emotional benefit transcends all of them. Is there just playing devil's advocate? Is there ever the danger of thinking a brand or even a certain product needs refreshing and potentially jumping the gun over in terms of the consumer maybe doesn't need that and the changes then has a negative effect in terms of they don't like the new packaging or something like that? Is that much easier to recover from than the opposite where you let it go. Is it let it become tired? Is it much harder than to real people back in that way? What's the kind of balance on that? It's a really good question. I think sometimes there is a feeling that you need to just change for the sake of change. And then the old adage that marketers tend to get bored quicker than our consumers do because we're living it day to day. And if you think about the iceberg analogy earlier, we've been working on a pack redesign project for a year by the time a consumer sees it. So we're bored of the new government. We're really familiar with it. So I think that's definitely true. And I have been in the situation in my career previously where we've made a change to a product because we believed that it was necessary. We felt like the market was moving on and our particular product needed to be updated in order to remain relevant. We made the change and the backlash on it was huge. And what we quickly discovered was that it wasn't actually a problem. Consumers were really happy with the product in its previous guys. It was actually internal noise that was making us feel like we needed to change it. And we then had to quickly pedal back and have stickering and comms to go out and say, "Oh, actually, we've gone back to what we had previously." And that's really hard to recover from. So I think being really considered, thinking it through deeply and being really clear about what is the problem that you're actually trying to solve and is it actually a problem? Yeah. I think it's really important and it avoids you wasting a ton of resource and energy on something that actually you've got different things to focus your energy on. Yeah, it's interesting. We've got that goodwill built up with the consumer. Even something that's changing in the logo, if they don't recognise it anymore, that can be completely gone. On that front, how do you sometimes distinguish what should be, say, the classic parts of the brand that should never change or change very little and compare to other parts that aren't maybe heritage of the brand that need to be updated? How do you go about deciding what assets are which? Yeah. We would typically do an audit of our distinctive brand assets. And we did this project a couple years back on all of our big power brands to understand that because I think, you know, insured to have kind of got an idea, but it's not until you really speak to consumers that you understand whether something is more meaningful than others. And on Richmond, for example, we know that the rolling hills, we know that the cream, we know that the house, all of those things are important. And if you start meddling with them too much, suddenly it doesn't look like the pack that consumers go into supermarkets to buy a week account. On Fridrad, as we know, it's the rays, the lockup that the logo sits in. So at the end of the day, all of us are very time poor, and we're under pressure when we're at fixture to pick things up and make decisions quickly at the shelf. So you want to make sure that you've got shortcuts in place to allow people to pick up your product over someone else's. So the minute you start meddling with the things that people are using as those quick shortcuts to make a decision, the more likely it is that they're going to pick up your competitors product over your own mom. Or worse, sometimes there's examples where people try and keep their eye on the competition so much. Actually, they start trying to copy what the competitors are doing. And again, there's examples of misattribution and advertising. And where you follow the codes of the category to such an extent, actually your brand isn't decipherable from your competitors. So I think it's about working out what the things that make you very unique and the things that carry meaning for consumers, and which resonate at the point of purchase in particular. Sometimes it must be difficult balancing that. And say, if you've got things that you think are so unique to your brand, but you still need to find that refresh. Like if the logo is so recognizable, perhaps if the coloring is so recognizable, that doesn't necessarily leave that much left to play with. So I guess sometimes it must be quite hard finding what those things that you can add and refresh and differentiate from before. Is that in terms of, does that always have to say, it doesn't have to be packaging, does it, but it can be, in terms of new campaigns, new positioning of the product in certain ways. How else can you kind of go about it? A brand that I really admire for keeping things fresh, but also very consistent would be someone like Spek Savers, where they've had the same line for the past 20, 25 years. But yet they have evolved it in a way that still feels so relevant. And every time you see a new execution, it just nods to that in such a contemporary way. So I think it is absolutely possible to keep the things that are true to who you are and the things that are integral to your brand, in which consumers can reel off, you know, without even really thinking about it, but evolving it in a way that makes it still feel very fresh and contemporary. Hmm. How, in terms of heading back towards kind of the data side of things, how do you go about managing that data and just say kind of segmenting that in terms of who consumers are, what's, you know, what they're looking for, when they've bought, when the last time, all of these data points, I'm sure that you have, how do you go about segmenting them and then deciding what is more important than others for certain situations? And also, is it the same across all the products that you offer? And, you know, is it different for refrigerators? Is it the rich mandal on what is the most important kind of things to be looking at? Yeah. In a world where there's such data now, how do you go and go about pinpointing the right ones? Yeah, I mean, there is a lot of data isn't there, if it's like we're kind of overwhelmed with information on a daily basis and opinions on a daily basis as well, if we're honest. So, I would say that it probably depends on the brand and the business. For us in particular, I would say that our brands are big, scalable, mainstream brands and as a result, perhaps the decisions that we're making with that data is different to a different brand. I think in our case, we'd be looking at demand spaces that offer significant scale. We want to be moving into things which are going to provide significant volume opportunities for us and our retailers and which are growing as well. You don't really want to be launching into a space which is going backwards, really. So, you want to be trying to jump on something that is on the upward trajectory. But then, critically, you've got to also assess whether your brand has a right to win in that space. There's something might be big and growing, but actually, if it goes against what your brand is all about, then you're probably not going to resonate with consumers, or they're going to find it a bit incongruous with other things that you offer. So, I think it's about making sure that you're going after the demand spaces which are most attractive in a way that your brand can genuinely fulfill. So, we would have what we call brand guard rails, where you'd be putting some very clear constraints around the brand in terms of what it can and can't do. So, you'd be going against a demand space to say, do we think we can actually win in this space? Would we have to loosen a guard rail? Would we have to perhaps change something in order to enter that space? And then, it's a conversation in terms of whether we think the brand can do that, and there's probably an element of testing there as well, required. If I was a smaller retailer listening to this, what aspect would you say? It's kind of most important in terms of the whole R&D process if you're looking to launch a new product or even refresh one, that maybe they're not as aware of as they should be, that maybe larger brands and they say pilgrims take advantage of maybe a bit better. I would say that where we've been most successful from an innovation and a comms point of view is where we have done little and often. So, where the testing is iterative, I have been in situations in the past where we've done testing right at the end of the process, and that's quite a high stakes game. You've already sunk a lot of time effort and money into something, and then basically you're crossing your fingers and hoping that it works. And that's not particularly enjoyable. It doesn't make it very easy to sleep because you're waiting for the debrief the following day and you've got a lot riding on it. So I would say the more that you can do, as I say on a little and often basis, the better, because you can then learn. and it doesn't feel quite as high pressure, you can make tweaks, you can optimize it, and you ultimately get to a better outcome in a slightly more cost efficient way. - Yeah, brilliant, hopefully that sort of listeners can say themselves and sleep this night, so if I take them to advice. Yeah, and kind of just on the last point in terms of innovation, you've mentioned before, there's been a case in your career where you've made a change and innovated and then it hasn't quite worked and eventually a decision was made to back to that. When is there an ideal point where it's now time to kind of kill that and either make another change or revert back? Is it more of a sales figures thing? Is it kind of a consumer reaction in terms of social media? What are some of the main signals and what's the point where maybe it needs to be? The decision needs to be made. - Yeah, innovation is hard. And there's an eye-watering stat that says something like 95% of innovation fails. So when that's your start point, it's quite sobering. And I think you have to always approach these things from a place of curiosity and positivity, accepting the fact that you've got to try some new things and be open-minded to the fact that somethings may work better than others. We would typically review innovation after 12 weeks because you want to make sure that you're giving it enough time in market to succeed, but also that you're not waiting indefinitely in order to make an intervention. And we would take quite a holistic approach to that post-launch review as we would call it. So we'd be looking at things like revenue, volume, profit, the kind of core metrics of the P&L. But then we'd also be looking at consumer reviews, we'd be doing some research actually where we'd be getting people to go out to store, see whether they notice it, take it home, does it live up to the promise that we made? So I think that's really important to do because it gives you a better sense of whether it's landing in the way that you want it to. And you have to accept that maybe sometimes things don't work, but it's important to distinguish between, is it an issue with the proposition or is it an issue with the execution? Both of those things are quite different and they drive different outcomes. So if it's struggling to get people to buy into it in the first place and that the awareness of it is low or the uptake of it is low, you've probably got an execution challenge. So maybe it's not standing out at the fixture in the way that it needs to. Maybe it's not merchandising the right place, et cetera. If the repeat rate is low, then you've probably got a fundamental problem with the proposition itself. And that's when you probably do need to go back to the drawing board to assess, is this showing up in the way that we thought it was going to? And is it delivering on the promise that we ultimately made? Is it necessarily that there's certain targets that are set before or around launch and that's what you're kind of basing them against? Or is it, you see at the end, like I say, at the end of those 12 weeks and then evaluate whether what's been hit is good enough in terms of the rest of the portfolio in terms of what you're just generally expecting? No, we're a very data led business. So I would say that we would have a mix of internal and external metrics. So from an internal point of view, we know that we've got certain thresholds that we need to hit in order to get certain efficiencies. We would know that we need to deliver a certain amount of profit and so on. So that's very kind of hard and fast and those targets would be set in advance and you're launching it on the basis that you deliver against those. But at the same time, you've got to have an external lens on it because you might be really happy internally with how something's doing, but actually if it doesn't stack up with the rest of the category, and the right asylum isn't where it needs to be or the levels of waste that retailers are seeing is too high, then internally you could be really happy with the performance, but you've then also got to have the retailer lens on it as well to make sure that actually it's turning in the way that it needs to and that it's ultimately playing a role in the broader category. Yeah, I think that touches on the interesting point as well on the retailer side of things. I'm sure a large part of your career is you're thinking of large supermarkets, grotesses and things like that. How have you seen that dynamic necessarily change over the years and what's it currently like? Obviously there's a lot of pressure on grocery as a market nowadays. Is it trickier to navigate now, isn't it, previously? I would say that private label has got a lot stronger over the past 10 years, certainly. And as a result, that creates opportunity but also risk to branded businesses. I would say that it does force you to up your game quite a bit and it makes you really consider what is it that makes your brand stronger and unique and you then have to think about different ways to activate and innovate. So it does force you to up your game and try and find as many reasons as you can to justify the role that you play for consumers because there are just so many more options out there now. I think what's particularly interesting at the moment is you're seeing a lot more, certainly in food, a lot more competition from beyond grocery. So things like QSR where you can buy a cheeseburger from McDonald's for 99p versus a meal deal, for example, at £3.50 or whatever it is now. So suddenly the competition is broadening beyond just the grocery market into other parts which previously would have been completely separate to that kind of mission. So yeah, I think it forces you to be a lot more creative about the solutions that you come up with and it does force you to really think critically about what is it that your brand can do that no other offering can do. Yeah. And make sure you communicate it in a really compelling way. Just kind of, finally before moving on to our closing segment, I just wanted to ask, you've led teams through significant periods of change in terms of the market itself, also, innovating products and things like that. What would you say is one non-negotiable as a leader trying to get their teams through this that keeps a team focused and creating as they should be when there's so much movement and change around? How do you get everyone pulling in the right directions? That comes down to clarity and honesty. The world is incredibly ambiguous. Internally and externally at times. So I think people can deal with that if they're clear on why that is the case and also what is expected of them. And we all have to do things that are hard or communicate messages that are hard or uncomfortable. But I think the more that you can be honest with people about why things are happening and be open as much as you possibly can around that, I think people are more likely to then trust you and empathize with you and ultimately do what they need to do in order to move the business forward. Is it also talks about what you mentioned earlier about it's a bringing in and trusting them with coming up with solutions and ideas of having that openness in terms of what might be going on or what issues may be arising can lead to solutions that may be coming from other parts of business that wouldn't necessarily have made provide the solutions forward, just be having that trust in them. Absolutely. And we work with a lot of agencies. We're lucky enough to work with some fantastic partners. And it's about bringing them into your world as well. It's about realizing that you can't solve all of this stuff on your own and that you do need to lean on the expertise of others. And typically if you go to an agency with a business challenge rather than a very specific brief, the breadth of thinking and the level of creativity that you get back will be so much greater. And I think if I look at the work that we've just put out the door on Richmond and Fridraders creatively, we've got to a way different and way stronger output, I think, on those campaigns more recently than we would have done if we'd gone in with a very prescriptive view of what we wanted. Because we were going to them with this is the challenge that we are facing help us solve it. And it's about putting our collective brain power on that. Yeah. And that kind of brings us on to our closing and the development of the podcast, which sees a question left from our previous week's guest. At this occasion, it was Rosemarshal, who's the managing director of the Scottish underwear brand, Malk. And she asks, what do you see as your superpower? So Fersey, thank you, Ros. I would say that I've always been someone who's brought a level of simplicity to communication and presentations. And it's something I probably shied away from the early part of my career. I thought that I needed to use lots of jargon and big words and sound really smart. I think there's a real pressure when you start your career that you've got to do that. And I realized very quickly that actually, I was quite good at cutting to the chase on communication and delivering messages in quite a simple way. Yeah, it makes things a little more efficient. Obviously, I mean-- I was definitely trying to overcompetect that art in case I contradicted myself. [LAUGHTER] Yeah. And Chris, that only really leaves us with one thing, which is, do you have a question for our next guest? I do. So I'd really like to understand, what do you think businesses are over-investing in versus the results that they deliver? Perfect. Yeah. We'll definitely put that to our next guest. Chris, thank you so much for talking to us today. It's been great. Thanks so much, Lewis. 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