Marketing and Business 101

New and Improved & Other Thoughts

Dear friends, with this publication, this is the last chapter of Marketing and Business 101. Oh, I have plenty more to give you, but I feel a strong inner pressure to address the art and science of selling. Way too many salespeople, as well as sales managers, approach selling the wrong way. I feel compelled to educate, or re-educate as the case may be, the way you should be looking at, performing, and engaging in the sales process.

If you are a sales manager, I hope I can persuade you to re-evaluate how you deal with your sales staff and their selling technique. There are things that most sales managers do that I believe are totally stupid and a waste of your time and theirs.

This new book, Selling 101, will take some time to organize and start presenting, so please keep checking back.

New and Improved & Other Thoughts

Every so often a product will be touted as "New" or "Improved", or "New and Improved". As consumers we all assume they are talking about the product, that somehow, they have made their product even better than before. That isn't always what actually happened.

Companies may "improve" their product by changing the packaging, or what used to be 8 ounces, is now 7 ounces. True, sometimes they do improve the product, such as "Now with stain Guard", or some other grand additive, or even the removal of something, such as, "Now with less sugar".

If they are telling you that something specific has been added or reduced, I would tend to believe them. But now the question is: how much sugar was taken out? One graham or five? In terms of adding ingredients, how much and is it truly of value or have they just renamed an existing ingredient?

Another "trick" is to make the package larger than the product inside. Toothpaste is a good example, pick up any package of toothpaste and give it a little shake, you will hear the product rattle inside the package. There is a good half inch or so of free space for that tube to slide around in. Get it home and open it, and you discover that the product isn't as big as you imagined.  Chapstick is a small product packaged in a box more than twice its size.  Why?  So people will be more likely to see it on the shelf or counter.

Now, some items such as cereal, chips, bagged candy, and the like will always appear as if you aren't getting as much as you thought you were. In these instances, don't blame the producer: Products settle, chips get broken, so the real culprit is gravity and to a lesser extent product handling.

Let me go back to the issue of adding ingredients to a product. Years ago, when I was young, Wonder Bread advertised that it had "added fiber". Fiber being a good thing, people did purchase it, and even today it remains a major bread product on the shelf. Then, one day the public found out what the "added fiber" was: Sawdust. Yes, they were actually adding sawdust to the bread dough and mixing it in and making bread with added (sawdust) fiber.

Shortly after word got around, the "added fiber" was removed from the packaging, however, I don't know if the sawdust fiber was removed from the product. Just thought you'd appreciate this story.

Let's turn our attention to the grocery store, there are "tricks" going on there as well. For example, producers/distributers pay the store for ideal shelf space, this is especially true at the check-out counter.

The products that produce the greatest margin, (profit), for the grocery store will be placed at eye level. Items that the store doesn't make as much profit on are placed on the bottom shelves, and also on the very top shelf. Don't be upset by this manipulation, if you owned a grocery store, wouldn't you want the more profitable products to be easily seen and taken?

Also, notice that Coke-Cola products and Pepsi products are never on sale at the same time. I assume it is an unwritten agreement, that you push your product one week, and I'll push mine the next. Or maybe the manipulation is done by the store, in any event, pay attention to that.

As an aside, do you know how Coke-Cola came to be? It was invented by a pharmacist in Atlanta, Georga as a cure for a hang-over. However, when invented, one of the secret ingredient's was a small amount of the drug Cocaine, hence Coke. Supposedly, the removal of cocaine was the only formula change Coke has ever made.

But that statement isn't completely correct. Many years ago, Coke-Cola introduced "New Coke", and dropped the old established Coke that we all knew and loved. Big mistake. Sales plummeted, Pepsi sales went up and people, (including myself), switched from New Coke to Pepsi.

Coke-Cola did a test of the New Coke in a couple of states in the North-East, and while people approved of the taste, the good people at Coke failed to inform the people that this new taste would replace the old familiar taste of Coke that they were accustomed to.

Two mistakes were made: (1) The testing was done in a small area of the country, to be truly representative of the nation, the taste testing should have occurred in multiple locations across America. (2) Those participating in the taste test were not informed that what they seemed to like, would replace the taste they were accustomed to tasting. Knowing that, a substantial number of testers would have likely said, "this isn't bad, but keep Coke the way it is."

In the end, New Coke was phased out, and Old Coke was re-introduced. This failure in market research was a heavy price to pay.

I may have covered this next point in a previous chapter: The Customer is Always Right.

It is a typical refrain among customers when the product or service provided doesn't live up to, or meet, the customer's expectations.

It is a myth that all businesses face at some time or another. The truth is that the customer isn't always right, but they are always the customer.

So even if the customer is wrong in their perception, they are still a customer and you should do everything in your power to accommodate them as much as possible. I was once in a position where a police officer wanted a recording device that would record his daughter without her being aware of being recorded. In some states that might be perfectly legal, but not in my state.

When the officer told me what he was going to do, I refused to sell him the equipment, because that would make me, (and the company I represented), co-conspirators or accessories to a Felony. He was vehement in his protests, repeating multiple times that "the customer is always right", but I stood my ground and suggested he try a different source. He contacted the district manager, who backed me up. I would have thought an officer of the law would know that that kind of "ease dropping" required a court order.

(In my state, at least one party to a conversation must know it is being recorded. This is why telemarketers, and survey people always say something to the effect of "this conversation will be recorded for training purposes". It's really to protect themselves from a law suit.)

*****

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