At Crayola, innovation is at the heart of the business, with more than 100 new products making their way to markets around the world. With such a significant innovation pipeline, understanding consumers, identifying winning concepts and making confident decisions about where to invest are critical to success.
For Matthew Frampton, Senior Director, Global Human Knowledge Studio at Crayola, this means rethinking both the role of insights within the organisation and how innovation success is measured. We caught up with Matthew at TMRE 2026 in Denver to discuss how Crayola is moving from traditional concept testing towards more predictive, actionable insights – and how its Human Knowledge Studio is becoming a strategic partner in shaping innovation decisions.
Short snippets below or you can view the full presentation from TMRE 2026 here.
At Crayola, the Human Knowledge Studio brings together a broad range of capabilities to create a more complete understanding of consumers and the marketplace.
From consumer research, social listening and direct consumer feedback to shopper insights and global category management, the team connects perspectives from across the business.
This combination of consumer and commercial understanding puts the team in a unique position to influence decisions, helping Crayola connect what consumers want with what will ultimately succeed in market.
One of the biggest changes at Crayola has been a shift in how the insights function operates within the business.
Following the rebranding of the team as the Human Knowledge Studio, the ambition has been to move beyond being seen as advisors to becoming genuine thought partners – involved earlier in the innovation process.
Rather than providing insights once decisions are already taking shape, Matthew and his team are working more closely with marketing, sales and licensing teams upstream, when there is still time to influence direction, refine concepts and make meaningful changes.
It's a shift that positions insights not simply as a way to validate decisions, but as a strategic driver of better innovation.
With more than 100 new products entering the market globally, Crayola faces a familiar challenge for innovation-led businesses: knowing which concepts to back.
For Matthew, one of the biggest limitations of traditional concept testing was the difficulty of connecting conventional KPIs to actual in-market success.
Measures such as purchase intent and likability could provide useful feedback, but they didn't necessarily give the team the confidence needed to predict which products would perform once launched.
And with significant resources behind every new product, backing the wrong concepts can be costly.
The team needed a more reliable way to identify potential winners early, while also generating insights that could help build a stronger commercial case for new products.
A key part of Crayola's shift has been moving towards metrics that connect more directly to real-world commercial performance.
By incorporating actual point-of-sale data and benchmarking against existing and competitive product launches, the team can evaluate innovation through measures that matter to retail partners – particularly rate of sale.
This changes the conversation. Rather than relying primarily on purchase intent or likability scores, Crayola can speak in terms that retailers already use to evaluate product performance.
But better prediction is only part of the story.
Matthew also highlights the value of more conversational consumer research, which helps uncover not just whether consumers like a concept, but what they are looking for and what needs to change to make a product more successful.
For product development teams, that means clearer direction on where to iterate and how to strengthen concepts before launch.
For Matthew, the value of working with Cambri extends beyond addressing the limitations of traditional concept testing.
What has stood out most is the relationship itself – one built around collaboration, curiosity and a genuine understanding of Crayola's business.
Rather than simply delivering research, the Cambri team has worked closely with Crayola to understand its innovation processes, commercial priorities and the language of its stakeholders.
That shared understanding has helped create a partnership focused not just on generating insights, but on making those insights more relevant and valuable to the business.
Ultimately, the biggest opportunity for Crayola is to make better innovation decisions earlier.
With so much time, investment and resource behind every new product, improving the ability to distinguish winning concepts from weaker ones can have a significant impact.
For Matthew, two things have been particularly important: greater confidence in predicting in-market success and the ability to evaluate innovation using commercially meaningful metrics such as rate of sale.
Together, these capabilities have helped shift the conversation internally.
When the team presented this new direction, the combination of stronger predictive capabilities and more actionable, retailer-relevant metrics immediately captured the attention of Crayola's leadership.
It's another step towards embedding insights earlier in the innovation process and ensuring that consumer understanding plays a central role in shaping the products that reach the market.
Matthew's experience at Crayola highlights a broader evolution in the role of consumer insights – from measuring reactions and validating decisions to actively shaping innovation strategy.
By bringing consumer and commercial perspectives together, getting involved earlier and focusing on predicting real-world performance, Crayola is creating a stronger connection between consumer understanding and business outcomes.
It was a pleasure catching up with Matthew at TMRE 2026 in Denver, and a huge thank you to Matthew and the Crayola team for sharing their perspectives and continuing to build such a collaborative partnership with Cambri.
If you're an Insights or Innovation leader, we'd love to hear your perspective: