‘AI for Marketing and Product Innovation’ Offers Unique, Practical Guide for Generating New Growth and Customer Loyalty

IRI’s Andrew Appel, MachineVantage’s A.K. Pradeep and Unilever’s Stan Sthanunathan Co-Author New Book That Arms Business Leaders With Road Map to Unlock Increased Revenues and Market Share

CHICAGO — Dec. 6, 2018 — IRI®, a global leader in innovative solutions and services for consumer, retail and media companies, has announced  that “AI for Marketing and Product Innovation,” a new book co-authored by President and CEO Andrew Appel, is available here as of today.

“AI has enormous potential to unlock growth and success for brands and retailers if it is executed well, or to destroy them if it isn’t,” said Appel. “AI offers unmatched opportunities to create a vastly more accurate and actionable understanding of customers overall on a very micro level that hasn’t been possible historically due to the lack of data and analytic horsepower. While other books either delve into AI theory or outline hypotheticals, our book offers practical solutions created by authors with decades of brand and retail experience.”

Authors Bring Unique Experience
The authors share more than 100 years of unparalleled expertise in strategy and product development, branding, and insights and analytics:

Andrew Appel, president and CEO of IRI: During his six-year tenure, Appel has dramatically expanded IRI’s services and reshaped the company into the innovation leader for CPG brands and retailers and media companies. Prior to IRI, he served as chief revenue officer of Accretive Health, as chief operating officer of Aon and as a senior partner at McKinsey & Company.

A.K. Pradeep, CEO of MachineVantage: Pradeep founded MachineVantage in 2016 to use the extraordinary algorithmic power of AI and machine learning to help marketers understand consumer purchase behavior and shape strategies around products, pricing, promotion and related activities. Prior to starting MachineVantage, Pradeep served as chief provocateur at Nielsen and earlier was founder and CEO of Nielsen NeuroFocus. Before that, he held positions at Meridian Consulting, BoardVantage and General Electric.

Stan Sthanunathan, executive vice president of Consumer & Market Insights for Unilever: At multiple roles over his 30-plus year career, including six years at Unilever and 17 years at Coca-Cola, Sthanunathan has been an aggressive advocate for improved utilization of data and analytics to enhance product and marketing strategy. In his 2016 Harvard Business Review article, “Building an Insights Engine,” Sthanunathan outlined the 10 critical characteristics of an optimal insights engine, divided into operational characteristics, such as functional independence and experimental orientation, and people characteristics, such as business acumen and well-balanced analytic and creative thinking styles.

Soon, 85 Percent of Consumer/Brand/Retailer Interaction Will Occur via Machine
“AI for Marketing and Product Innovation” begins by highlighting the potential for AI, such as drastically improving the success rate for new product introductions — which currently hovers in the pitiful 10 percent range — and eliminating millions in wasted advertising spends due to ineffective planning and targeting.

It continues by digging deep into the math behind AI and the types of data incorporated to achieve dramatic improvements in critical areas of brand management and retail, ensuring readers and authors are on the same page when addressing specific ways AI improves decision making. “AI for Marketing and Product Innovation” then delves into new territory, such as outlining how AI uncovers consumers’ conscious as well as subconscious thoughts and identifies the contexts and associations for these thoughts (e.g., a musical lyric might evoke memory of certain foods). With this type of information, marketers can build algorithms that result in identification of new product ideas and answer questions such as, “What can we add to this product idea to premiumize it and fetch a higher price point?”

IRI will donate Appel’s proceeds to Not Impossible Labs, an award-winning technology incubator and content studio dedicated to changing the world through technology and story.

For more information about “AI for Marketing and Product Innovation,” visit: https://www.iriworldwide.com/en-us/AI-for-Marketing-and-Product-Innovation.

About the IRI Partner Ecosystem 
IRI fundamentally believes that delivering differentiated growth for clients requires deep, highly integrated partnering with a variety of best-of-breed companies. As such, IRI works closely with a broad range of industry leaders to create innovative joint services and access to capabilities to help its clients more effectively compete in their various markets and exceed their growth objectives. IRI is committed to its partnership philosophy and continues to actively enhance its ecosystem of partners through alliances, joint ventures, acquisitions and affiliations. The IRI Partner Ecosystem includes such companies as 84.51°, Adobe, The Boston Consulting Group, Clavis Insight, comScore, Data Plus Math, Edison, Experian, GfK, Gigwalk, Google, Ipsos, Jumpshot, Mastercard Advisors, Omnicom, One Click Retail, Oracle, Pinterest, Research Now SSI, Simulmedia, SPINS, Univision, Valassis Digital, Viant, Yieldbot and others.

 

About IRI
IRI is a leading provider of big data, predictive analytics and forward-looking insights that help CPG, OTC health care organizations, retailers, financial services and media companies grow their businesses. A confluence of major external events — a change in consumer buying habits, big data coming into its own, advanced analytics and personalized consumer activation — is leading to a seismic shift in drivers of success in all industries. With the largest repository of purchase, media, social, causal and loyalty data, all integrated on an on-demand, cloud-based technology platform, IRI is empowering the personalization revolution, helping to guide its more than 5,000 clients around the world in their quests to remain relentlessly relevant, capture market share, connect with consumers, collaborate with key constituents and deliver market-leading growth. For more information, visit www.iriworldwide.com.

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IRI Contact:
Shelley Hughes
Email: Shelley.Hughes@IRIworldwide.com
Phone: + 1 312.474.3675