Live from InnoCos USA

This morning at InnoCos USA in New York's Park Central hotel, L'Oreal spoke about how beauty and digital are not just a magical combination, but they are one in the same. This duo allows cosmetic companies to connect across the entire beauty consumer life cycle. The digital conversation begins when she buys her first product. This is the starting point of a lifelong digital relationship in which the beauty company gets to know her, talk to her, and the consumer becomes a "fan", telling all her friends why you're so great. So much of beauty--beauty conversations, beauty purchases, etc.--is online. If you are a beauty company and you're not digitally communicating with you consumer then "you're dead."

Colgate-Palmolive discussed the advantageous partnership personal care companies can make with external partners to further leverage their internal technologies. It can be a very challenging process but it creates immense opportunity and a wealth of fresh ideas.

Other discussions included a presentation from Patrick Ternier of Innovation Framework Technology based on the premise that a company's only source of profitable growth is their ability to innovate, defining innovation as the transformation of knowledge to money; and the need to mobilize intelligence to be profitable.  

The morning ended with a interactive and rather entertaining presentation from SKIM on taking innovation to market by: finding out who your customers are, what they want, and why they want to believe in the benefits of your product. There was also an extremely insightful look at how to develop product claims that work. More details to come ...