Consulting to Leaders on Next Generation Marketing, Innovation, and Organization Strategies

Daniel is a marketing & innovation consultant based in Cincinnati, Ohio.  He taught marketing & innovation strategy at the Rotman School of Management at University of Toronto in the Executive MBA Program and was a Harley Procter Marketing Director at Procter & Gamble where he worked for 21 years.  He was known for his work on disruptive innovation successes including Crest Whitestrips ($250 million in North America sales today) and Tide Pods (Over $1 Billion in sales today).  Daniel was the Tide & Ariel laundry products Franchise Leader in the Developed World for five years 2005-2010.  During this time, he led P&G’s efforts on Commercial Innovation which produced an NPV of $1.2B.  Daniel then moved to report to P&G CMO to start a group on the “future of marketing” and lead the development of a new P&G Brand Building Framework, in the first six years.

In his corporate role, Daniel also led the career and skill building efforts for the 200 commercial leaders assigned throughout the globe to “FEI” (Front End of Innovation) groups.  Daniel left P&G to start DEA in 2013, focused on brand building driven by the science of behavior change.  He has adapted and implemented his Behavior Change Brand Building Framework at many of the leading consumer products companies globally.  He also works with multiple PhD social psychologists to deliver large scale quantitative studies such as behaviorally predictive segmentation and behavior change studies for both commercial and public health clients.

Dr. David Neal is a behavioral scientist and psychologist specializing in behavior change and the advanced measurement of human decision-making. He is the Founder and Managing Partner of Catalyst Behavioral Sciences, and an Executive-in-Residence at the Duke University Center for Advanced Hindsight. David has published widely in the areas of social psychology, cognitive science, health and consumer behavior. His academic research focuses on finding new ways to “nudge” or influence people to change their behavior without relying on their rational, logical thinking processes.

Dr. Neal’s academic publications have been cited more than 4000 times and he appears regularly in the press as an expert psychologist. His research studies have been featured in Time Magazine, The New York Times, NPR, BBC, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, and USA Today, among others. Dr. Neal focuses on applying behavioral science thinking to consumer and health behavior change. He advises a range of health organizations, including the Center for Disease Control, World Bank, USAID, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Johns Hopkins Center for Communications Programs and the Surgeon General of the US Army.

Examples of his work in partnership with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, identifying habit change pathways for sexual and reproductive health behaviors in girls and young women; in partnership with FHI360 and USAID, identifying new habit change tactics to promote handwashing behavior, and in partnership with the World Bank, identifying habit change tactics and “nudges” to promote behavior change.

In the consumer domain, some current and former clients include The Procter & Gamble Company, Microsoft, Intel, Johnson & Johnson, and The Kroger Company, and Bayer among others. His commercial work focuses on new ways to predict and ultimately impact consumer behavior, without relying on traditional “rational” marketing techniques. Prior to founding Catalyst Behavioral Sciences, Dr. Neal was a research professor of psychology at the University of Southern California and Director of Duke University’s Social Science Research Laboratories.

Pete Foley is an Innovation Consultant who specializes in applying Psychology, Behavioral Economics and Perceptual Science to business challenges.  An experienced innovation leader and practitioner, he draws on 25 years at P&G, whereas a serial innovator, he published over 100 patents, and co-led the foundation of their Behavioral Science capability.  Pete is experienced in understanding deep seated and implicit consumer needs, and turning those insights into practical product, package and services innovations for the consumer goods, retail, and hospitality industries.  He also leads customized innovation and design thinking workshops, and supports the design and placement of consumer tests built around principles of consumer psychology. Recognized as one of the top 20 bloggers on Innovation Excellence, the world’s biggest web-based innovation community for the past 5 years, he is a regular blogger for a variety of publications, and a sought-after keynote speaker.

As an independent consultant, he has built on collaborations with world-renowned experts from a wide range of disciplines associated with applied psychology, behavioral and perceptual science to synthesize insights that deliver against practical business needs. He is a co-author of several published scientific papers on the evolutionary psychology of beauty and attraction, gender and marketing, and a white paper on the application of Behavioral Economics to help low-income families manage their financial lives. He also has a track record of collaborating closely with designers, and is himself an exhibited artist, published photographer and an expert in Photoshop. Pete has a PhD in Chemistry from The University of Nottingham.  He also holds a BSc in Chemistry with minors in Economics and Mathematics.

Dr. Juliano Laran is a behavioral scientist and consumer psychologist specializing in nonconscious drivers of human motivation. Dr. Laran, who is one of the top 20 most productive marketing scholars in the world, has published in the areas of consumer behavior, food consumption and self-control, social psychology, and management science. His research focuses on how to make consumers motivated to pursue their goals associated with health, spending, and productivity. His work has been cited 2000 times, and his research has appeared in articles in the New York Times, NPR, Forbes, Time Magazine, NBC News, ScienceDaily, Runner’s World, HuffPost, and others. Dr. Laran’s research applies behavioral science to the understanding of how a person’s environment can influence their motivation without their awareness. Typical interventions involve understanding which stimuli people are exposed to in their daily lives and how these stimuli influence their decisions and behaviors without their awareness. This is followed by a prescription of how these stimuli can be modified to encourage desirable behaviors.

In the consumer domain, some current and former clients include MARS, Valvoline, SC Johnson, Amazon Prime, Seagram’s, Walmart Brazil, and Bank Itaú. His commercial work focuses on understanding the customer journey and the main points along this journey where there are nonconscious influences on a consumer’s decisions and behaviors, in addition to understanding how consumer identities (i.e., who consumers think they are and want to be) influence their purchasing behavior.

Pete was the Group Vice President of Brand Building Integrated Communications Leader at Procter & Gamble. He has over 40 years of CPG brand positioning, advertising, communications, and marketing experience. At P&G, he turned around several billion-dollar businesses based on brand re-positioning, big ideas, new advertising campaigns, and integrated communications. He’s expert at working with creative agencies of all types to develop business-building creative content. Pete led P&G’s Reinvention of Agency Relationships and dozens of agency searches, interviewed over 300 creative agencies in the USA and around the world (lived and worked on 3 continents…NA, Europe, Asia). He is an expert at global brand strategy, communication evaluation, developing integrated advertising campaigns, agency pitches and relationships, integrated communication process, global equity and brand positioning management, agency evaluation, and leading expert marketing organizations.

Pete was designated Harley Procter Marketer in 2007 (P&Gs highest marketing award. He developed advertising which turned around multiple brands and won several Effies, Gold, Silver and Bronze Cannes Lions, and a Grand Prix Cannes Lion in Print; developed three ads for the SuperBowl which were rated in top 3 on AdMeter; and created the first interactive Super Bowl ad where hundreds of thousands of consumers created the commercial just minutes before airing. He is special advisor to the Ad Council, Kraft Heinz, and ABInBev, and has served on Grand Effie, Clio, and Cannes Lions Juries.

Brett is an accomplished Innovation Management executive with 31 years of experience creating breakthrough results for some of the world’s best-known global FMCG brands. Brett now provides innovation management consulting to help large and midsize companies transform their innovation capabilities and results. As one of the ‘fathers’ of Innovation Management at Procter & Gamble, Brett is known for his leadership in creating disciplined, yet agile innovation capability. He has a proven track record of building high-performance innovation teams, while working with senior business leadership to create breakthrough results for global brands.

Brett brings together a fundamental understanding of strategy, organization dynamics and key innovation activities, to ensure that complex challenges are solved with simple solutions. His experience across the entire spectrum of innovation practices ensures that he delivers Breakthrough Productivity, bringing bigger innovation to market faster. He has worked extensively across the world, and has lived in North America and Europe. Brett was recognized with P&G’s Magnus award for his breakthrough work in supply chain synchronization and innovation management. He pioneered this work on some of the biggest businesses and programs, such as the global launch of Tide Pods.

Heather helps marketing leaders unlock intuitive business, marketing, innovation, retail and advertising strategies rooted leveraging insights from behavioral science. Most recently, she spent 3.5 years at Amazon.com where she managed the global relationship and JBC partnership between Amazon Advertising and Procter & Gamble, the world’s largest advertiser.  She has consulted with brand teams to define opportunities to grow on and off-Amazon using insights, digital media tools, behavioral audience strategies and measurement approaches and has hands-on Amazon retail experience, both as a DMM in textbooks (new & rentals), and as a small business seller in the Amazon Marketplace.

Prior to Amazon, Heather spent 16 years at Procter & Gamble where she is best known for her work with the CMO to develop and activate the Company’s latest Brand Building Framework and Innovation Big Idea models, both grounded in applied insights from behavioral psychology.  In this capacity, she delivered over 60 internal consulting engagements and workshops across the company’s biggest brands and innovation bets and presented repeatedly to the C-suite and Board of Directors.  Heather spent 13 years working on prominent P&G global Beauty brands. She was the General Manager for the P&G Ventures Beauty portfolio, which included OPTE, the break-out beauty star of the 2019 and 2020 CES shows, and led another 50 successful new product innovations including COVERGIRL Lash Blast Mascara, Secret Outlast deodorant and Max Factor Lipfinity as well as 2 successful brand restages.  She is named on 4 P&G patents.

Rachel helps brands move from short-term transactions to long-term business growth by developing consumer-centric brand strategies. She uses behavior science to help brands understand what matters most and utilizes the consumers’ story and the tensions within to find the most powerful insights. Rachel has helped a host of clients develop these strategies through consumer research and brand strategy workshops spanning across major CPG, tech services, healthcare, venture-backed startups and more. Prior to her work with these clients, Rachel spent 11 years at Procter & Gamble leading various Insights and Analytics teams. She led P&G’s efforts to create Best in Class Strategic research methodologies globally, even creating the industry standard for how to measure and track Brand Health. She also spent time leading P&G’s efforts to integrate Insights and Analytics into Media Planning and Buying, guiding central media measurement and optimization opportunities across all of P&G’s North American portfolio including joint partnerships with all major media partners (NBC, Facebook, Google, Apple, etc.), and helping to identify what was needed to link P&G’s CRM system and DMP to better optimize media in house. In this media optimization capacity, she also focused on bringing insights and measurement to the forefront for activations for against demographic specific groups, including multicultural consumers and generation based-segments. She also has a passion for shopper insights and led P&G’s Insights and Analytics for their Retail Innovation Center where over 100 top retailer customers came each year for joint business planning & shopper-based design partnerships, step changing how these retailers can deliver value to the consumer both in store and online.

Since the early 1980’s, Steven has operated in the Global Fragrance and Flavor Business, an industry that deals primarily with the senses. Trained in Economics and Marketing Research in Amsterdam, the Neatherlands, Steven explores worldwide consumer moods, preferences and lifestyles. Within the passion of predicting “what’s next”, he has developed a Visionary and Holistic View while becoming a global expert in marketing, trends and consumer insights. In the function of Visionary and Creative Director at Firmenich, the Swiss based Fragrance and Flavor supplier, Steven helped to establish the first Creative Marketing Studios for the Perfumery and Flavor Divisions.

During the past 25 years of his career, Steven has been involved with almost every Fortune 500 manufacturer in the fast-moving CPG world. As a Front-End Innovation Industry, Firmenich has to be able to anticipate change, in all major global markets, five years ahead in order to create flavor and fragrance trends instead of following them. To better stimulate the Firmenich creative processes, in 2001, Steven began a system to signal trends at their earliest incarnation. Information is systematically collected from the 15 most trend-driven cities (i.e., London, Paris, Tokyo, New York, Seoul and Sao Paulo) and then analyzed before bringing them into future scenarios for developing new products or services. Connected with many of the world’s mavericks in the sciences, art, architecture, design and subcultures, Steven proves that “a part of the future can be predicted”. When not traveling around the world (to apx. 120 cities annually), Steven lives in Bangkok and Geneva.

Linda has been with DEA since 2019 as Daniel’s Executive Assistant. Her duties include calendar management, travel plans, and various other support assignments. She previously spent 14 years at P&G as an Executive Assistant in Marketing, and over 15 years with Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, Eaton Corporation, and others.

Penny joined DEA as the business was getting established, and is now the Business Manager handling all DEA operations. She is responsible for contract review, liaison with legal, bookkeeping, invoicing, accounts payable/receivable, client correspondence and other business needs.  She previously spent 23 years at P&G in a variety of roles in Marketing, to include Marketing Specialist, Marketing & Diversity Recruiting, Executive Assistant and Marketing Capability Manager.

Since DEA’s inception, Karen has been responsible for client specific and category research, analysis, and recommendations. She is involved with project planning and the development of business cases and presentations for innovation strategies, cognitive & behavioral marketing strategies, and commercial innovation. Karen is a versatile and creative brand builder with experience in both B2B and B2C brand strategy and marketing communications.  She has an agency background serving as both Business Development /Marketing Director and Vice President of a print and packaging Design Agency and was the Co-founder of one of the first Digital Agencies in Cincinnati, Ohio. As the owner of Building Distinctive Brands, a B2B Marketing Consultancy, Karen’s clients represented Professional Services, Industrial Manufacturers, Telecommunications, Healthcare, Higher Education, and Cities. In addition, Karen partnered with Procter & Gamble for twelve years providing program management, research, analysis, and business case development for global brand building and capability building initiatives.