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.