How Turning Point Brands Decoded Their Fastest-Growing Product

Turning Point Brands — the publicly traded company behind a growing portfolio of modern oral products — had a problem most companies would love to have. Their nicotine pouch brand ALP was winning. Launched in late 2025 through a joint venture, ALP hit $200 per store per week in early retail channels and was tracking toward $60–80M in combined modern oral revenue.

But here's the thing about winning: if you don't know why you're winning, you can't replicate it — and you can't scale it.

The executive team had hypotheses. Strong brand association. The right flavor profiles. Good retail placement. Maybe it was the nicotine strength range. Maybe it was the pouch format itself. But hypotheses aren't insights — and in a nicotine pouch market growing 40% year-over-year with new entrants flooding in monthly, guessing wasn't a strategy.

When Eric joined as Chief Growth Officer, he brought a rare combination of lenses: deep nicotine industry experience from his years as President of JUUL Labs Canada and VP of Export Markets, data infrastructure expertise from his time as COO at RudderStack, and strategic rigor from his years as an Engagement Manager at McKinsey. He'd seen firsthand what happens when consumer products companies scale without understanding their consumer — and he wasn't going to let that happen at TPB.

Eric needed to decode what made ALP succeed — moving from correlation to causation — and build a repeatable consumer intelligence capability that could inform the entire modern oral portfolio. Research timelines had to compress so product and commercial teams could iterate in weeks, not quarters. Cross-functional teams needed direct access to consumer voice, not insights filtered through a 60-page research deck. And every study had to feed a compounding knowledge base that got smarter over time.

Traditional research was built for a different era. The tobacco and oral nicotine industry has historically relied on large quantitative panels, annual brand trackers, and expensive qualitative studies that take 6–8 weeks to field and cost $15K–27K per project. For a category moving at the speed of modern oral, that cadence is a liability.

Surface-level data masked the real drivers. TPB had plenty of sales data. They could see what was selling and where. What they couldn't see was why a consumer chose ALP over ZYN in that specific moment at the convenience store counter — the emotional, functional, and social drivers that quantitative data simply doesn't capture.

Consumer research was siloed. Insights lived in the research team's reports. Product development, brand marketing, sales strategy, and retail partnerships all needed consumer intelligence — but by the time a traditional study made it through the organization, the market had already moved.

New market entrants were compressing decision windows. With the US nicotine pouch market surging and dozens of new brands launching, the window to establish ALP's position was measured in months, not years. The research approach needed to match the speed of the market.

Eric's first move was running a deep consumer study through User Intuition to understand the ALP success story from the consumer's perspective — not through surveys or focus groups, but through extended AI-moderated conversations that probed 5–7 levels deep into purchase motivation.

Study 1: Decoding ALP's appeal. Within 48 hours, Eric's team had 30+ minute conversations with over 100 nicotine pouch consumers who had tried ALP. The AI moderator — trained on structured laddering methodology — didn't just ask "what do you like about ALP?" It probed into the emotional and functional layers beneath the surface.

Study 2: Competitive positioning validation. The same week, a second study explored how consumers perceived ALP relative to competitors in the space. Instead of relying on brand tracking surveys, the conversations revealed the actual decision architecture — what made ALP feel differentiated at the point of choice, and where competing brands were making their positioning plays.

Study 3: Merchandising intelligence by market. The always-on capability enabled Eric's team to run market-specific studies that revealed something the sales data couldn't: growth was highly local in nature, and the primary lever wasn't just brand strength. It was merchandising — shelf presence, product placement, and the visibility of ALP at the point of sale. The findings were clear enough to act on immediately: sales teams needed to spend the majority of their time ensuring the product was prominent on the shelf, not just in distribution.

Study 4: New product concept testing. With the ALP playbook taking shape, the team began using User Intuition to test new flavor concepts, packaging variations, and messaging approaches before committing production resources. What used to require a formal research project became a 48-hour validation cycle.

The compounding effect was the real unlock. Every study fed into User Intuition's Intelligence Hub — creating a searchable, queryable knowledge base of consumer voice that anyone on the commercial team could access and act on directly.

Research cycles dropped from 6–8 weeks per study to under 72 hours — roughly 95% faster. Cost per study fell from $15K–27K to approximately $1,000 for 20 deep interviews, a 93% savings that turned qualitative research from a quarterly budget event into a continuous capability.

Interview depth tripled. 10–15 minute panel surveys gave way to 30+ minute moderated conversations with 5–7 levels of probing — the kind of depth that reveals why consumers behave the way they do. Consumer voices per quarter jumped from 50–100 via annual trackers to 200–300+ through continuous studies, delivering 3–4x more signal into every product and positioning decision.

The merchandising insight from Study 3 changed how the commercial team operated. Sales resources shifted toward ensuring shelf prominence and product visibility market by market — the specific behavior the consumer research had identified as the primary growth driver. The results landed in the next quarterly report: TPB beat the quarter by over 40% and gained share in the nicotine pouch market at a moment when new entrants were competing aggressively for the same shelf space.

Access to insights shifted from research-team-only reports to the entire commercial organization via the Intelligence Hub — fully democratized. And the time from insight to commercial action compressed from weeks or months to days.