• Wall Street Journal, Wednesday, June 30, 2010 11:15 AM

Procter & Gamble went Frankenstein for Pantene, putting caps on women's heads to measure their brainwaves as they watched ads for the brand. The high-res electroencephalograms showed, in one case, viewers focused more on the model's expression than on her hair so they tweaked the spot.

But that was nothing compared to what took place before P&G got to the ad stage, when the consumer products giant went all scientific. Ellen Byron tells us how the company studied -- and studied -- women's emotions around hair, particularly "the dreaded bad hair days," which it put "at the center of a massive research and advertising effort."

In 2009, P&G went about trying to plumb the depths of "bad hair days" as well as understand the advantage of having the opposite. Byron quotes one company scientist on the latter: "If people are having a good hair day, do they focus more on what they're doing? It raised a lot of interesting questions we need to consider on the power of a good hair day."

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