Monthly Archives: July 2015

July 6, 2015 · 11:26 am

All Wrong Is Right

There is a truism in gambling that you don’t need an indicator that’s right all the time to help you predict winners.  You do just as well betting using an indicator that is wrong all the time as long as you remember to bet the opposite of what the indicator predicts will happen.  Consistency and accuracy are what you’re after, and something that is wrong all the time is very accurate, albeit in the wrong direction.

12 pack of Crystal Pepsi cans

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I thought of that when I read about a study to be published in the Journal of Marketing Research.  It dubs certain consumers “harbingers of failure,” because they are people whose tastes lead them to buy new products that are doomed to failure on a very regular basis.  In other words, if one of these folks buys your new to the market product, kiss it goodbye:

A study of retail purchases from about 130,000 consumers at a national convenience store chain found that 13 percent of them had purchasing habits that predicted failure of a new product, defined as surviving less than three years. Specifically, half or more of the products they bought flopped.

So, customers who bought Diet Crystal Pepsi are more likely to have bought Frito Lay Lemonade. Both failed. Further, not only is their early adoption of a new product a strong signal that the product will fail, but “the more they buy, the less likely the product will succeed,” the researchers wrote.

That’s from the Chicago Tribune report on the study.  So what does this have to do with your business?  We often get way too focused on what’s a straight line; the indicators that confirm a positive relationship between what we’re doing or marketing and a growth in revenues.  What this study points out is that we need, instead, to focus on ANY indicator that has a demonstrable correlation to our success or failure no matter what form it takes.  Finding 15,000 consumers who always seem to purchase products that fail is fantastic.  While it puts you in the unenviable position of rooting for certain people NOT to buy your new product, it also allows you to take action.  In this case, the recommended course is to ask people not only whether they would buy the new product but what other products they buy — to judge whether they have mainstream tastes.

And that should help you make more winning bets!

 

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July 3, 2015 · 9:09 am

Fake

Small tomatoes in Korea

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This Foodie Friday Fourth of July, let’s get real about fakes.  I was shopping for tomatoes the other day.  They had some beautiful looking specimens at the market and I knew from a lot of sad experience that they would be tasteless.  They probably came out of a hothouse hundreds of miles from where they were being sold. Unfortunately, they were typical of a lot of modern foods but they make a broader business point.

Our industrialized food production system has managed to remove a lot of the natural flavors of things.  Why?  Because we want things like tomatoes year-round, we have to transport them further, and in many cases, we have completely “fake” foods to which flavors n=must be added for them to taste like anything remotely worth eating.  This is from a talk by a UPenn doctoral candidate:

Berenstein began by narrating synthetic flavors’ earliest and biggest coup: turning vanilla from a coveted luxury good into a synonym for the bland and everyday. For two hundred years after its introduction to the West, vanilla was a precious commodity. Artificial pollination helped increase the global supply by allowing the plant to grow outside its native Mexico, but the real turning came in the 1870s, when scientists cracked the molecular structure of vanillin—and opened the floodgates for the manufacturing of synthetic vanilla flavor.

I think fake foods and flavors have peaked because consumers want the real thing and it’s not just in their food choices.  The desire for authenticity is now a constant in most businesses. Customers quickly recognize when we brands are faking it.  I like this explanation from someone writing in Ad Age:

Authenticity involves an emotional connection with an audience, and that connection is forged over years through consistency. Consistency builds trust and integrity. Ignoring the reality of your audience’s world, trying to be something you’re not, or telling customers what you think they want to hear quickly deteriorates trust and erodes integrity.

When we make our businesses more efficient for us, we might just be removing the flavor the customers crave.  It’s no longer real. Something that sort of tastes like what you took out what do.  Like that hothouse tomato, I’m not buying.  Would you?

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July 1, 2015 · 10:01 am

The Power Of No

Almost everyone I know complains that there never seems to be enough time in the day. Time really is a zero-sum game and even if you go without sleep (really a BAD idea) you eventually run up against that 24-hour limit. The answer, then, isn’t to find a way to make more time but to do fewer things. That’s the power of no.

It’s hard in business not to chase every opportunity, particularly when you’re a small company that’s just learning about in which of those opportunities lies the best chance for sustained profitability. As a marketer, there is a never-ending stream of media that provide the ability to interact with your audience. Social media grows daily and the support needed to maintain a steady stream of conversation in them grows with the number of channels.

As individuals, we take on tasks with impossible deadlines. We lose sight of the cost/value equation with respect to the time required for some pieces of work vs. the benefit gained to the enterprise or even just personally. We might even dig ourselves a hole by accepting responsibility for a task that we don’t have the skills to do. All of those things are self-defeating and could be stopped with just one word.

When I began consulting I was overwhelmed by the number of people who wanted my help.  The problem, I soon found, was that they had neither the ability nor the intention to pay me for my time (there is that word again).  As I’ve said to many people over the years, the Stop & Shop doesn’t take stock certificates at the checkout.  I’ve learned to say no.

Sometimes “no” isn’t about stopping something altogether.  You don’t really need to post on Facebook every hour nor does everything you run through Twitter have to be unique to that platform – cross posting is OK, honest.  Even so, being more efficient can help but ultimately “no” is  every once in a while.  Agreed?

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