Marketing Alzheimer’s

Calvin L. Hodock

Professor of Marketing, Berkeley College

 

In both marketing and warfare, “know thy enemy” is a valuable mantra.  Sun Tzu’s best-known aphorism on intelligence applies.  Know thy enemy and know thyself.  If ignorant both of your enemy and yourself, you are certain in every battle to be in peril.

 

The people who are responsible for the new product efforts at many of our blue-chip consumer goods companies should heed the sage counsel of Sun Tzu.  It could help to reduce the failure rate of new products.  Nine out of ten new products fail at these companies.  The wisdom of Sun Tzu could help stamp out Marketing Alzheimer’s- a serious malady in innovation malpractice.  Many flawed new products are simply carbon copies of ideas that have floundered in the past.

 

Listerine toothpaste is a good example.  It failed twice, both because it had a bad taste and because of negative imagery from its mouthwash heritage.  Taste is an important driver in the toothpaste category.  Why did Listerine not know this?  Marketing Alzheimer’s.  It is everywhere, like the Visa card.

 

The beer barons are gluttons for punishment.  Desperate for growth, they have chased such ill-fated new products as low alcohol beer, no alcohol beer, dry beer, ice beer, malternatives, and low carb beer.  Each crashed into a fiery ball of flames.  Didn’t they understand that diets like low carb are simply fads destined to drop off the radar screen?

 

Those who forgot their history are condemned to repeat it.  The precedent for failure was there with the earlier demise of Zima from Coors.  Each later “innovation attempt” represented a history lesson forgotten.  None of these innovations from Anheuser Busch, Coors or Miller had staying power.

 

IN early 1999, Kellogg’s introduced Ensemble, al line of psyllium and oat based products- pastas, cookies, snack cakes, potato snacks, frozen entrees and cereals.  These are healthy foods that are designed to lower cholesterol levels.  Other marketers have tried the line concept before.  It never works.  History repeats itself, and Kellogg’s flunked their history exam.

 

When dealing with a unified line, supermarkets prefer to scatter the individual products in the appropriate departments around the store.  It is impossible to build brand identity for the line with the trade cherry-picking the items in the line.  The real estate in stores is too valuable to give any unified line critical mass.  Kellogg’s should have known this, given the past debacles associated with attempts to sell a line of products in supermarkets.

 

Here is another mistake from past history that the architects of Ensemble disregarded.  Healthy foods geared towards lowering cholesterol levels have been tried before- for example, Intelligent Quisine from Campbell’s Soup.  The majority of Americans are clueless about their cholesterol levels.  The answers are not in the stars; they can be found in the filing cabinets of history.  Neither Intelligent Quisine nor Ensemble has a sea-change impact on the marketing fortunes of these companies, which were desperate for sales volume given the decline of condensed soup and ready-to-eat cereals.

 

Why not remember the history of flawed innovation initiatives?  Why waste resources on new products that have failed before.  Establish an innovation knowledge base for successes and failures, but especially the later, for all major product categories.  Make new product managers pore through it to improve their innovation IQ’s.

 

It might be helpful if the Chief Marketing Officers did the same.  They would be better prepared next time they listened to the latest innovation fairy tales from their new product teams.

 

The company’s proprietary knowledge base should include all product successes and failures in key categories.  The data and information should be developed and updated by outside sources.  Here’s why.  In many instances, the architects behind the failure have left the company and taken valuable knowledge with them.  The reasons for failure have become amorphous folklore.  Outside consultants with no axe to grind ensure objectivity in building the knowledge base.  This affords management the opportunity to learn from mistakes without anyone playing the “blame game.”

 

Want to stamp our Marketing Alzheimer’s?  Contact us.  We’d be delighted to move forward on a knowledge base guaranteed to improve you innovation batting average.