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Dave Lundahl

Hitting the Product Innovation Homerun

Posted by Dave Lundahl on June 30, 2011

I am a big fan of baseball.  This is the season (spring / summer) where baseball is top of mind for many.  It has led me to consider how winning at baseball is analogous to how to improve new product innovation.   Success comes from thinking behaviorally in how you approach innovation.  Traditional innovation thinking uses a push-to-market strategy where products are developed and then marketed on the basis of filling identified feature “white space” within target product categories. 

The Elusive Search for the Silver Bullet - Emotion Measurement

Posted by Dave Lundahl on September 8, 2010

Everyone in our industry is looking for a silver bullet – a way to measure emotions.  Why?  There is a belief that if the capability to measure emotions existed, then researchers could incorporate this new source of information to better guide product innovation and development decisions.  However, it’s not that simple.  In fact, I think this is an elusive search.

As Marketing Researchers and Consumer Product and/or Sensory Researchers, we need to focus on “emotion insight,” not “emotion measurement”. The two are extremely different and not necessarily dependent.  Let me explain.

You Want Me to Eat What?

Posted by Dave Lundahl on August 4, 2010

Summary of Dr. Dave Lundahl’s recent talk given at the IFT 2010 Annual Meeting:Three Steps for Changing Consumer Nutrition Behavior

How do you reconcile the need to change consumers’ nutrition behavior with developing wellness-related food products that sell?  In recent years, this is a question industry experts have been struggling with - as obesity in the U.S. continues to be one of the highest in the world.                

Thus far, efforts in the health and wellness community to improve diet have largely focused on changing the consumer.  Food science has given innovators the ability to bring more healthy food to market.  However, these efforts have had only marginal success in motivating a change in consumer buying behavior.  In order to bring about real change in the kinds of foods that consumers buy, fundamentals of human behavior need to be uncovered.

Holism: The Whole as More Than the Sum of its Parts

Posted by Dave Lundahl on June 30, 2010

The word holism is from the Greek meaning all, entire, total of all the properties of a given system (biological, chemical, social, economic, mental, linguistic, etc.).  Rarely can any system be understood by understanding all of its component parts. However, this is exactly what we do in consumer product research.

Getting Strategic: Focusing the Fuzzy Front End of Innovation

Posted by Dave Lundahl on March 17, 2010

Marketing researchers and their counterparts in product development, sensory researchers, have often been criticized by corporate executives for not being strategic enough. I have always found this interesting since strategists are the first to agree that they need better insights to develop strategy. Many strategy plans are often poorly implemented, resulting in unmet goals. Is it the fault of strategists for not inviting researchers to the table, or the fault of researchers for not delivering insights of strategic value?

Meeting the Challenges of a Changing Marketplace: The Emotionally Driven Consumer

Posted by Dave Lundahl on January 14, 2010

Consumers today are becoming much more emotionally driven in their behaviors. Consumers are finding themselves “depleted” in a number of ways, they have a lack of time, energy, or the financial resources to cope with this ever changing world. According to psychologists, the more depleted the consumer, the more irrational (emotional) they become. This depletion affects how consumers purchase and use products, relying more and more on habitual behaviors – driven more by emotions than rational thought.