What Were They Thinking?
Marketing Lessons You Can Learn from Products That Flopped
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
Those ignorant of the mistakes of the past are bound to lose a lot of money. That's why Bob McMath founded the New Products Showcase and Learning Center--a "Smithsonian for Stinkers," Business Week dubbed it. There, executives from top corporations pay huge amounts of money to rummage through some 80,000 products gone awry. Their mission: to avoid the misguided, expensive, and occasionally ludicrous mistakes that trip up even top companies.
In What Were They Thinking?, McMath shows you how to avoid such mistakes, with more that eighty marketing lessons he's learned from his long experience with clods and clunkers. As People magazine put it "McMath knows his goods--and his uglies, too"--and here he shows you how to:
Steer clear of the number one killer of new products (page 129)
Develop a marketing campaign based on a "Significant Point of Difference" (page 183)
Take advantage of eight "Hot Buttons for Success in the Millennium" (page 101)
Keep out of the "Buy-This-If-You're-a-Loser School of Marketing" (page 28)
Combat "Corporate Alzheimer's" (page 4)
and much more !
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
To their credit, McMath, a business consultant headquartered in upstate New York, and Forbes, a freelance writer, don't simply present some of the worst product ideas of all time (rabbit jerky, Frito-Lay lemonade); instead, they try to use the failures of such products as Crystal Pepsi to impart basic marketing wisdom. In the case of the clear soft drink that disappeared without much fizz, the lesson is, Don't fiddle with the corporate cash cow. The Pepsi brand is too important to risk on such off-beat ideas. Insights such as "sell benefits, not features" are not new, though the authors give a twist by explaining that the pause that "refreshes" is a vastly superior message to the pause that's "cold and wet." But in this humorous account, tying those thoughts to products that failed certainly helps make them memorable.
