Cannabidiol is being treated by everyone on the business as the next big thing. It is getting media coverage as a treatment for mental health problems, so its connection to personal care isn’t that obvious. But if you think logic has anything to do with this sort of thing, well you haven’t been paying attention. Anything with a bit of a buzz around it is good enough. In fact there is a reasonably good case for cannabidiol being of some use on the skin. If it can affect receptors in the brain there is a pretty good chance that will do the same to receptors in the skin which could be beneficial for pain and itch. We don’t have any data to back this up yet, but that isn’t the kind of detail that troubles the folk who are looking to get ahead in a crowded market.
At time of writing everyone is talking about cannabidiol and there are lots of projects going on. A few pioneering skus have hit the shelves, but it is far from mass market yet. I predict that by this time next year there will be CBD variations of most of the major brands and maybe even a couple of new ones.
Continue reading
I was listening to a talk about marketing the other day and the speaker referred to the old fairy story of the elves and the shoemaker. The shoemaker was down on his luck and down to his last pieces of leather. It was desperate times – even if he could make a pair of shoes from them the price he could get wouldn’t cover his living costs and still leave enough over to buy more leather to keep going.
When you are developing new products it is very easy to mess them up. I think more disasters are caused by spoiling good ideas than by trying to get a bad idea to work. Here are a few ways to convert soaring swans into frumpy turkeys. 
I was invited to give a talk about the NPD process at the