EHL Group — What Happens When FMCG Innovation Meets Education
EHL Group is one of the world's most respected hospitality schools. As someone who spends most of her professional time in the FMCG innovation space, I became curious about a specific question: how do the consumer friction diagnostics I apply to food products translate when the "product" is an online learning experience? This is a self-initiated analysis — not a commissioned project. I mapped EHL's publicly available digital learning platform using the same framework I apply to FMCG challenges: identifying friction points, hypothesising root causes, and proposing a structured roadmap.
The Question: Do Innovation Methods Travel?
In FMCG, when a product underperforms, I look for friction: where in the consumer journey does the experience break down? The same logic applies to digital enrollment. If a prospective student visits a platform and doesn’t sign up, the question isn’t “is the content good enough?” — it’s “where did the experience fail them?”
I applied a 3-step diagnostic framework to EHL’s online offering: audit the observable user journey, hypothesise the critical drop-off points, and propose targeted fixes. The same methodology I use on dairy yogurt and frozen pizza — applied to executive hospitality education.
What I Found: 3 Friction Points Blocking Enrollment
Inflexible delivery formats
working professionals need modular, time-flexible options; the platform’s structure made commitment feel high-risk
Navigation complexity
too many paths, unclear course hierarchy; a prospective student couldn’t easily find “what is right for me”
Scope overload
the breadth of offering created decision paralysis rather than ease
What This Exercise Taught Me
“The consumer insight frameworks I use in FMCG travel well — but they arrive with different names. What I call ‘taste penalty’ in food becomes ‘commitment friction’ in education. The root dynamic is identical: a gap between what the product promises and what the experience delivers at the moment of decision.”
Amandine Devergies
