Getting It Right the Second Time - Michael Gershman (Addison-Wesley, 1990)

This is a quick, entertaining read on the history of several major products with emphasis on difficulties they experienced in getting started or in dealing with market changes.  It is also a guide to thinking about marketing when it explores how the challenge facing each product was addressed.  [658.800973]

Companies fail and products fail.  Even the most successful companies have their "New Coke" moments.  Sometimes the trajectory of failure can be changed.  This book looks at forty-nine major consumer products that, surprisingly, were not the successes that they became.  In fact, many looked like they were never going to achieve any consumer acceptance.

In analyzing these stories, the author identifies what changed in product promotion or placement.  In fact, he uses the forty-nine stories to illustrate the value of twelve aspects of marketing.  For example, Quaker Oats was sold originally in open containers from which grocers would fill bags for sale.  Henry Parsons Crowell, who had bought the failing Quaker Mill, was up against a virtual monopoly in the steel-cut oats market.  Crowell's insight was to sell the oats prepackaged as a guarantee to cleanliness that also reduced grocers' work time filling open bags, eased shipping, and allowed a space for recipes suggesting other uses for oats.  Gershman uses this anecdote to stress the value of packaging as the pivotal change with the opportunity for premiums and promotion to add on.

In another example, Gershman describes how Kimberly-Clark began by offering Kleenex as a premium, disposable face cloth for removing makeup in the 1920's.  Despite price cuts and promotion by Hollywood stars, the product was not moving.  What Kimberly-Clark did hear was that customers were using the product instead as a handkerchief substitute.  This prompted them to survey users with newspaper ads.  The results were definitive as to how Kleenex were really being used and Kimberly-Clark duly changed its pitch of the product.  Success was further enhanced by a lower price and the pop-up style of packaging.

Each chapter focuses on one of the author's marketing principles by explaining how it can be applied.  He then offers three or four anecdotes to illustrate the lesson.  The twelve marketing principles Gershman describes are pitch, piggyback, perception, position, packaging, placement, price, premium, promotion, publicity, promise (warranty), and perseverance.  (The gimmickry of making everything begin with the letter "p" has to be overlooked.)  The anecdotes strengthen each discussion of a principle by making the concept clearer in its application.

Even if one has no interest in marketing, the anecdotes should be an enjoyable read.  The book is recommended.       

Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba - Tom Gjelten (Penguin Books, 2008)

A well-written account of the history of Cuba - and its relations with the United States - as seen through the fortunes and travails of the Bacardi family and their rum.  [338.766359097491]

Perhaps by virtue of geography, Cuba's history since the 19th century has been linked to the history of the United States.  The island has been a lure for American interests for since at least the 1850s.  It was eyed as a prospect for expansion of the slave territories by some in the South before our Civil War.   The United States intervened in its revolt against Spain in the 1890s and inherited a global empire as a result.  Thereafter, the United States was uncertain about what it should do with its new dependent.

Tom Gjelten has chosen an innovative way to explain Cuba's recent history and its tangled relationship with the U.S. by following the fortunes of one of its premier families, the Bacardis.  Across several generations, members of the family had been important in commerce, in the revolution, in civil administration, and even in the Castro Revolution.  At the same time, the family was introducing new distillation processes and moving to become the leading rum distillers on the island.

Although rum was easily found throughout the Caribbean, there was no Cuban rum industry at the start of the 19th century.  Cubans produced a form of aguardiente from their sugar, but the molasses was refined into rum in New England and elsewhere.  Facundo Bacardi returned to Santiago de Cuba from Spain in the 1850s after several years' absence to find his local warehouses had been looted and that he faced a financial struggle.  Sugar had stopped rising in price and the demand for molasses from the United States was falling off.  He chose to develop a distillation process that improved on the rather rough local distilled products.  He experimented carefully with sugar concentrations, preparation, and distilling techniques until he achieved a satisfactory rum.  He then developed a brand and a market for his rum.

Emilio Bacardi became involved in the business with his father after his return from study in Spain.  He also became sensitive to the ills of slavery and to the rising aspirations of the Cuban people to be independent of Spain.  He became a patriot and eventually joined the rebellious forces.  The revolt ended after ten years, but soon Spain again began to neglect the rights of Cubans.  After the U.S. intervention, Emilio Bacardi had to adapt to working with the new government as a functionary.  It was still not complete independence.  The U.S. government imposed its own restrictions on the autonomy of the Cuban government.

The twentieth century brought a series of changes.  Prohibition in the United States encouraged American travel to Cuba.  The government, however, decayed into a corrupt dictatorship under Fulgencio Batista which provoked a new revolution in the 1950s.  The Bacardi Company was sympathetic to the Castro forces; Raul Castro even married a daughter of a senior Bacardi executive.  Perhaps that is why the company felt betrayed when the Castro government nationalized the Bacardi holdings in Cuba.  From that point forward, the Bacardi Company became a forceful member of the Cuban diaspora resistance.

With late twentieth century capitalism, the anti-Castro sentiment played out in rivalries among major liquor conglomerates such as Pernod Ricard, Diageo, and Bacardi Limited.  The struggle came down to trademarks, labels, and import licenses.  In this contest, once again American political considerations came into play.  That challenge for Cuba is the underlying theme of the book.

The book can be detailed in trivial aspects of the Bacardi family life.  It is, however, an engrossing history set against the history of one family.  With the warning that some sections focus more on individual lives rather than the larger tides of history, this book is recommended.  

Breakfast at Sotheby's - Phillip Hook (Overlook Press, 2014)

A witty look at the modern art market.  The book is formatted as a brief lexicography with entries on aspects of art presentation, history, and anecdotes.  From fakes and forgeries to the personal lives of artists, this book always leads to how the price of an art work is affected.  [707.5]

Phillip Hook served as a director at both Christie's and at Sotheby's.  From these experiences, he draws insights into the functioning of the art market as a response to aspects of the works that make each one more or less desirable. 

Although this book and the classic The Economics of Taste, which covered the variations of the art market from 1760 to 1960, each provide some analysis of the art market, the similarity ends there.  The approach taken by Hook is not an updated analysis of statistics of sales records by artist.  Hook instead presents a lexicon of key terms and names in five areas: the artist, subject and style, wall power, provenance, and market weather.  Within these categories, he presents brief essays on individual artists (such as Géricault or Breughel) which may deal with their biography, but also attempts to identify periods or subjects of the most auction  appeal, or he addresses concepts (such as Branding or Color) to note how it affects the salability of artists' works.

The book is a rich store of anecdotes, many from the author's own experiences (and mistakes), to illustrate the peculiarities of the market for art; that is, a market in which every item may be unique, a market which is driven by forces that defy analysis: status, emotions, and fleeting opportunities, and a market distorted by frequent rent-seeking behavior by some investors.  Along the way, the reader is introduced to factors that drive art prices.  One learns that blue skies over sunny landscapes with bright colors sell positively.  Hence, the Impressionists continue to enjoy a strong market.  The right frame becomes important, even though it isn't a fixed aspect of the work itself.  The public generally dislikes rain, muddy colors (even those of van Gogh's early work), religious themes, especially martyrdoms, and war.  Even individual artists' work may be affected by some non-aesthetic concerns: is it a Mondrian with any red in it? is it a Chagall with a blue background?

This book is recommended as a refreshing break from issues of policy or from quantitative analysis and offers a reason to rethink what economic behavior encompasses.