Pernella Geluk - Geluk Marketing

For Pernella Geluk, innovation only drives brand growth when it starts with relevance and is followed through with discipline, adequate timing and entrepreneurship. As an independent marketing and innovation consultant, she helps food companies turn consumer and customer insight into concrete concepts, successful launches and long-term growth. Working mainly in FMCG food, both on the consumer side and increasingly in B2B, Pernella sees innovation not as a pipeline of new products, flavours or formats, but as a way to solve meaningful problems for consumers, customers and businesses.

Brand Growth Starts with Relevance

For Pernella, brand growth starts with understanding what people actually need. “Brand growth really starts with relevance. You have to understand what end users need, but also what customers in the value chain, such as retailers, foodservice partners or B2B clients, are looking for. Those needs are not always the same, but they can reinforce each other. And in combination with a clear vision and strategy, and consistent execution, you can realise sustainable growth.”

That also shapes how she looks at success. Business results matter, but so do penetration, repeat purchase and brand preference. A launch that creates trial is not enough if people do not come back. “If you are really talking about brand preference, then for me it is about people coming back,” she says. “One or two purchases is more like a hype or trial. It is no repeat.”

This is why product quality remains central. Communication can create attention, but it cannot compensate for a product that does not deliver. Especially in food, the experience itself determines whether people return. As Pernella puts it simply: “If the taste is not good, there is no reason to launch it.”

“Brand growth really starts with relevance. You have to understand what end users need, but also what customers in the value chain, such as retailers, foodservice partners or B2B clients, are looking for. Those needs are not always the same, but they can reinforce each other. And in combination with a clear vision and strategy, and consistent execution, you can realise sustainable growth.”

Innovation is about Solutions that Matter

Innovation can be a breakthrough product or service, but it can also be a better format, recipe, proposition or process. What matters is whether it creates value. “For me, innovation is translating insights into solutions that truly matter. Solutions for a consumer, a customer or the company itself. You can also innovate internally. Ultimately, innovation is about making an improvement that connects to an underlying need.”

As markets move faster and product life cycles become shorter, companies feel pressure to keep renewing. But more innovation does not automatically mean better innovation. “The market is changing quickly, and that continuously asks for renewal,” she says. “But it is important to bring focus and direction to that, so that we do not keep filling shelves and foodservice with wild new ideas, but with concepts that are future-proof.”

One area where she sees opportunity is crossing traditional category boundaries. The shift towards eating less meat and more vegetables, for example, is not just a product challenge but also a retail and behaviour challenge. Supermarkets often separate meat, meat substitutes and vegetables, while consumers shop from routines. “Everyone has their routines,” Pernella says.

“You want to consciously seduce people to try something else. But if that option is not next to it, you are asking consumers to walk three displays further.” So the future shelf could be where meat (substitutes) and vegetables come together, an overarching category aligned with current customer relevance.

‘’Ultimately, innovation is about making an improvement that connects to an underlying need.”

Timing Makes the Difference

Even a relevant idea can fail if the timing is wrong. Pernella has seen innovations that were not bad ideas, but simply arrived before the market was ready. While working with a food innovator, she saw how an idea around traybakes was identified years before the format became familiar to the wider market. The trend was there, but consumers did not yet understand the concept or recognise the need. “You can not only be too late, but also be too early in order to achieve success,” she explains. “Timing is crucial.”

Being an early innovator requires more investment. A brand then needs to educate the market, build understanding and work with trade partners to create rotation. “You can have a good idea, but can you realise it? Not just getting the product on shelf, but also making sure rotation starts.”

That makes innovation an entrepreneurial process. Research can reduce uncertainty, but it cannot remove it completely. At some point, companies need to decide whether they believe in an opportunity enough to back it. “You cannot wait until it is big, because then you are already too late,” Pernella says. “That is where you have to use your business sense.”

Different Consumers need Different Innovations

The food transition shows why one solution rarely works for everyone. In the shift towards eating less meat, some consumers are ready for fully vegetarian or vegan products. Others need smaller steps. Pernella says: “If we want to make this transition successful, we really need to create change and innovation on all fronts. Hybrid meat, replacing meat with tasty vegetables, more vegetarian dishes. We need to develop, inspire and move on all fronts.”

The key is to segment without polarising. Trendsetters may embrace radical change, but the mass market often needs reassurance and familiarity. “You have to be careful not to make it so drastic that it starts to polarise against the large mass,” she explains. “Then they do not become frontrunners, but opposites.”

“You have to be careful not to make it so drastic that it starts to polarise against the large mass.”

Better Preparation Reduces Failure

Many innovations do not survive for long. Pernella refers to the often-cited idea that around 80 percent of innovations are no longer on shelf after a year, while noting that this includes many flavours, variants, formats and packaging updates. That makes the quality of the preparation essential. “You can reduce failure costs by doing the preparation better. By

making sure you have better insights into the real needs, by understanding the timing well, by testing properly beforehand and by involving your customer.”

The biggest opportunity lies at the front of the process. Too often, companies move quickly into brainstorming, creating many ideas without enough direction. Pernella therefore works with innovation platforms: overarching themes based on market, consumer and customer insights, combined with the company’s own capabilities. Without that direction, innovation risks becoming a scattergun approach: lots of ideas, but without a structured, consumer-based foundation or a clear understanding of the target audience. That also lowers the chance that new concepts will truly land.

This also requires ownership. In many companies, marketers are busy managing day-to-day priorities, and innovation is easily pushed aside. Pernella believes companies need a dedicated innovation role, or at least someone with the time and space to step away from daily pressure. “When innovation becomes urgent, you are already too late.”

“When innovation becomes urgent, you are already too late.”

AI can Help, but only with Direction

AI can support innovation by speeding up analysis, clustering information and helping teams explore possibilities faster. But for Pernella, that speed only becomes useful when companies already know what they are trying to achieve. “AI can bring a lot of confusion if you do not have a sharp idea of the direction you want to move in,” she says. “Then suddenly everything becomes possible.”

Used only as an idea generator, AI may make the existing problem worse: more ideas, but not necessarily better ones. “The problem is not generating ideas,” Pernella says. “The problem is knowing your target and what you are aiming for.”

For Pernella, successful innovation is therefore not about more ideas, but about sharper choices. It is the combination of consumer understanding, timing, entrepreneurship, creativity and disciplined execution that turns innovation from a new product on the shelf into a real driver of brand growth.