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Kim Duncan
Head of Consumer Insights, Givaudan · Brand-side
Topics Kim shaped
AI & technology, Methods, methodology & rigor, Consumer behavior & culture, Industry, profession & meta, Researcher craft & identity, Insights function & business
Episodes
- Beyond Demographics: Redefining Flavor Segmentation with Kim Duncan — Ep. 14 · Jun 24, 2025
What Kim said — indexed claims
- AI will compress insights timelines and surface themes humans cannot see by hand, but the consumer plug — primary research, multi-data-point integration, the human deciding which question to ask — does not go away; AI is going to be how researchers do it faster, not what gets done instead of researchers. — Ep. 14 · 42:26 ·
cl-kim-duncan-021 - Both 'risk' and 'adventurous' mean different things to different segments — what is risky to a trailblazer is unrecognizable as risky to a hesitator, and a follower's idea of adventure does not resemble a trailblazer's; treating these words as universal is a category error. — Ep. 14 · 14:31 ·
cl-kim-duncan-010 - Survey questions should be designed to make socially-acceptable or aspirational answers difficult — using a wide-context battery (flavor, shopping, restaurants) rather than narrow self-reports because consistency-faking across many contexts is much harder than faking one. — Ep. 14 · 06:26 ·
cl-kim-duncan-004 - Adoption-curve segmentation patterns transfer across consumer domains, but with a structural caveat: in flavor every consumer is a participant, while in domains like health and wellness roughly half the population opts out of the category entirely — collapsing the active segments into a smaller share of the total. — Ep. 14 · 34:25 ·
cl-kim-duncan-017 - Categories conventionally treat 'mainstream' flavors as universally safe, but the segmentation overlay reveals that of twenty mainstream flavors, perhaps only six are mainstream for Hesitators — explaining the launch failure pattern where a mainstream-bucketed flavor flops with a hesitator target. — Ep. 14 · 37:37 ·
cl-kim-duncan-018 - Once a person has established adult life, their position on the flavor adoption curve is largely fixed; preferences may shift at the margins, but a hesitator does not become a trailblazer, and the population-level distribution of segments stays stable over time. — Ep. 14 · 26:45 ·
cl-kim-duncan-014 - In an abundant marketplace, products designed for 'everyone' will succeed at a vanishingly small rate — the durable model is creating the right product for someone, with adoption-curve segments naming who that someone is at each launch stage. — Ep. 14 · 12:56 ·
cl-kim-duncan-008 - Flavor adoption segments are demographic-agnostic: there are roughly as many adventurous millennials as non-adventurous ones, and the assumption that 'a demographic is all the same' is a primary driver of the 80% new-product failure rate. — Ep. 14 · 09:00 ·
cl-kim-duncan-005 - When suppliers build a segmentation, they should design it to complement — not contradict — the customer's existing segmentation; the goal is an additional layer of value, not a replacement. — Ep. 14 · 03:33 ·
cl-kim-duncan-002
Connected across the corpus
- Steve Olenski (CMO Whisperer Advisory) — 2 cross-references
- Ben Valenta (Fox Sports) — 1 cross-reference
- Brittne Kakulla (AARP) — 1 cross-reference
- Deborah Mendez (Pharmavite) — 1 cross-reference
- J. Walker Smith (Kantar) — 1 cross-reference
- Karen Kraft (Johnsonville) — 1 cross-reference
- Tina Tonielli (Haleon) — 1 cross-reference
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