Why Some Think P&G's Innovation Is Slipping | Jack Neff - Advertising Age

Tucked in an area north of Cincinnati is an office-warehouse building that looks like a movie set. It contains fully functional mockups of two homes (one upper-middle class, one lower-income) complete with kitchens, bathrooms and laundry rooms. It has two mock grocery stores and a virtual-reality lab where you can fly over store shelves. And, just like a front operation in a spy thriller, the complex is innocuously called BRI Research -- to avoid letting consumers know that they're involved in studies for Procter & Gamble. This is the Beckett Ridge Innovation Center, or BRIC, in P&G parlance. And P&G, whose innovation record has come under growing scrutiny, hopes it can deliver. Analysts and investors are decidedly unimpressed with P&G these days.

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The Big Game: What Corporations Are Learning About the Human Brain « The Situationist

As I stake out my position on the couch this evening – close enough to reach the pretzels and my beer, but with an optimal view of the TV – it will be nice to imagine that the spectacle about to unfold is a sporting event.It shouldn’t be too hard: after all, there on the screen will be the field, Brian Urlacher stretching out his quads, Peyton Manning tossing a football, referees in their freshly-starched zebra uniforms milling about.Yes, I’ll think to myself, this has all the makings of a football game. How foolish. The Super Bowl isn’t about sports; it’s about making money.And with 90 million or so viewers, there is a lot of money to be made. With CBS charging an estimated $2.6 million for each 30-second advertising spot, it’s no surprise that corporations don’t mess around with guessing what the most effective approach will be for selling their products.They call in the scientists.brain-on-advertising.jpg For the second year in a row, FKF Applied Research has partnered with the Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, to “measure the effect of many of the Super Bowl ads by using fMRI technology.

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Big innovation needs ‘Big Data’ - FT.com

‘Big data’ is all the rage, and for good reason. Companies need to sort through tons of it to understand what products their customers really want, and what they will buy. After all, their future depends on it. Yet, in spite of vast amounts of market intelligence and virtually unlimited information, how well do companies really know their customer? In a world where, according to the Association of Product Management and product Marketing, more than 50 per cent of new technology products that enter the market fail, and roughly 75 per cent of consumer packaged goods and retail products fail to earn even $7.5m during their first year, we are clearly not doing a good job putting this data to work.

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Don't let market research myopia distract you from innovation - Jim Clemmer - Innovation Tools

Customer and market research, competitive benchmarking, and focusing on market share could be detrimental to your organization's future performance. These approaches are critical improvement tools. Top performing organizations have turned them into a disciplined and useful science. But they can also lead to "me-too" followership or - even worse - commodity products and services that compete only on price.

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A Better Choosing Experience - Strategy & Business - Sheena Iyengar and Kanika Agrawal

When consumers are overwhelmed with options, marketers should give them what they really want: ways of shopping that lower the cognitive stress argue Sheena Iyengar and Kanika Agrawal.

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