That new product launch you spent months perfecting? There’s an 80% chance it’ll fail. Those campaign strategies your team debated for weeks? They’re missing the mark with your audience.
Successful brands don’t just guess what customers want—they test, learn, and adapt. The most impactful marketing and product innovations aren’t built on single strategies alone but refined through continuous experimentation. This iterative approach, often called “Test & Learn”, helps companies optimize decisions, reduce risk, and accelerate growth by validating ideas in real, everyday environments before scaling.
Orchard helps brands leverage real-world consumer behavior through iterative testing to drive more effective product launches, ad campaigns, and customer experiences. This approach transforms uncertainty into actionable insights by revealing what actually works through real-time testing and learning—allowing companies to quickly adapt before investing heavily in the wrong direction.
You invest months in development, burn through marketing budgets, and hope consumers will respond positively. And the odds aren’t in your favor.
The numbers tell a sobering story: More than 30,000 products are launched every year and 80% of them fail, according to Harvard Business School professor, Clayton Christensen. Harvard Business Review also found that 75% of CPG and retail products don’t even reach $7.5 million in first-year sales. This happens partly because consumers are creatures of habit—they stick with what they know unless something truly compelling captures their attention. Yet despite massive investments in market research and data analytics, most products still fail, revealing a disconnect in how we understand consumer behavior.
This disconnect stems from an industry-wide challenge. Many brands rely heavily on data-driven decision-making to minimize risk, often at the cost of creativity. While analytics are essential, “the obsession with data has led to an industry that measures everything but means nothing,” as Flavilla Fongang explains in Adweek. This data-first mindset prioritizes cost-cutting and performance metrics while sacrificing what resonates with consumers.
Through iterative testing, we move beyond one-and-done decisions to continuously test, learn, and gather insights to evolve our understanding of consumer behavior. Instead of making costly, all-or-nothing bets on a single launch or campaign, brands can adopt Test & Learn mindsets that balance creative innovation with data-driven validation. By continuously experimenting, analyzing real-world feedback, and refining messaging or product strategy, we can improve outcomes over time—delivering campaigns and products that don’t just perform but genuinely click with consumers.
To capture true consumer intent, brands, and insights teams must rethink their approach. Here’s how:
Minimize risk, maximize learning
Rather than launching and hoping for the best, brands can validate ideas early through small-scale experiments that provide valuable learning opportunities:
Takeaway: Small-scale testing creates a safety net for innovation, turning potential failures into valuable learning opportunities before significant resources are committed—building an organizational knowledge base that improves future decisions.
Faster speed to market
Instead of waiting for a "perfect" solution, Test & Learn enables incremental improvements that shorten product and campaign development cycles:
Takeaway: Iterative testing allows companies to launch, learn, and improve continuously—creating a competitive edge through speed while still delivering quality that meets customer expectations.
Optimize marketing performance
Marketing often operates as a black box, where decisions are made with limited data. However, brands that systematically test their creative, messaging, and media strategies outperform those that rely on gut instincts alone:
Takeaway: A culture of experimentation leads to higher engagement, better ROI, and lower wasted spend—turning marketing from a creative guessing game into a science without sacrificing creative impact.
Customer-centric decision making
Consumers don’t always behave as expected. Test & Learn puts real customer responses at the heart of decision-making, minus the guesswork:
Takeaway: Real-world testing puts customer behavior at the center of innovation—ensuring products and campaigns genuinely resonate with audiences rather than relying on guesswork or assumptions about what should work.
The most successful organizations don’t just test occasionally—they make experimentation a core part of their foundation. They test, they learn, they adapt—and they get closer to success with every experiment. This continuous, iterative testing becomes their greatest competitive advantage.
Test & Learn is more than a methodology—it’s a mindset.
Through Orchard’s in the wild testing, we capture real-time consumer behavior, turning insights into actionable strategies that evolve as you do, minimizing risk while maximizing insights.