Last month while speaking at the Continuing Education Forum of the Institute of Food Technologies, I was asked about other presentations that I have given. The following lists most of those given during the past two years.

Researching Research:

One company's summary of a fifteen-year program aimed at assessing the strengths and weaknesses of Market and Consumer Research.

Should we be assessing our research methods? This year we will be researching approximately 230,000 new product ideas. From these ideas, about 25,000 will be introduced into the market. In less than one year, 90% of the new introductions will be considered market failures. The cost in terms of time, effort and funds lost in the 90% failures is bad enough but think of the implications in regards to the ideas that were rejected. How many of the approximately 200,000 ideas were really good ideas that were rejected on the basis of the way they were researched and not the ideas themselves?

This company identified the five weakest areas in their consumer research program and the four root causes of the weaknesses. These findings along with steps taken to improve the effectiveness will be presented. Specific case studies will also be presented.

This presentation has been given 61 times to Companies, Universities, and at Conventions.

Assessment in Context: (A subset of Researching Research)

This presentation discusses the concept of "assessment in context" and gives the research history with case studies involving this concept. The focus is on moving the research lab from facilities such as Malls to "Real Stores" to bring reality into our testing.

I focus on the following:

• seven key elements of a brand (product, package, positioning, promise, price, promotion and image)
• five elements of a package (form, features, graphic design, copy and shapes), and the
• ten personalities of a package (container/transporter, protector, facilitator, attention getter, communicator, image builder, instructor, educator, reminder and secondary life).

Keeping the Pipeline Full Because Change is Inevitable:

The presentation is about Exploring New Opportunities. In this presentation I cover the concepts of:

• eight potential areas for change leading to opportunities (consumer, competition, market, trade, technology, households, legislation and ideas)
• three areas for change (products, package and positioning)
• three levels of change (modification, evolutionary and revolutionary)
• three levels of research (exploratory, experimental and evaluative)
• two types of research (technical and perceptual)