• Ad Age, Monday, December 7, 2009 10:38 AM

After a year of weathering the recession, major package-goods marketers such as Procter & Gamble, Reckitt Benckiser, Kimberly-Clark, Energizer and Unilever are getting ready to unleash a flurry of new products and innovations, Jack Neff reports, although retailers say that they haven't noticed much movement to date. But Nielsen's Bases CFO Brian West has said that more clients are spending their market-research dollars in the new product area and Schawk, a pre-press and package design service, is also is seeing signs of a turnaround.

One area to watch is the diaper war between P&G and Kimberly-Clark, whose CMO, Tony Palmer, has indicated that innovations in 2010 would likely result in more TV advertising. For its part, P&G is introducing Pampers that are 20% thinner in March, according to a report by Goldman Sachs.

Neff points out that emerging markets will see more innovation next year than the U.S. "Focus will be skewed towards developing markets, as this is where the main battles will be and it is actually easier to innovate, as a lot can be leveraged from what has been done elsewhere," one senior executive tells him.

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