Brands don’t usually notice when their consumer has already moved on, and keep running on assumptions that are no longer true.

Richard Heath, Chief Innovation Officer at Curion Insights, has spent his career building the internal conditions that make it possible to catch that shift before it becomes a crisis. On this episode of Ponderings from the Perch, the Little Bird Marketing podcast, host and CEO Priscilla McKinney sits down with Heath to get into what those conditions actually require and why most organizations are further from them than they think.

A culture of innovation is not something a company declares. It is something a company measures, and the distance between those two things is where most brand strategy quietly falls apart. Heath makes the case that without a structural, accountable commitment to trying things that might not work, innovation is just a word on a values slide.

"Your consumers' needs have changed," Heath explains. "Let's innovate. Let's do something different to meet them."

AI can process market research insights at a scale no human researcher can match, and yet some consumer shifts still catch the industry off guard. The GLP-1 shopper research Heath's teams conducted across the US and UK markets is one of them, and the buyer personas most CPG, food, and beverage brands are still working from do not reflect what has already changed.

Music written and performed by Leighton Cordell.

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