Selling Blue Elephants : How to Make Great Products That People Want Before They Even Know They Want Them

by Moskowitz, Howard R., Ph.D; Gofman, Alex

• ISBN13: 9780136136682
• ISBN10: 0136136680
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-04-11
• Publisher: Pearson Prentice Hall

Summary

Creating new ideas just became easier, because customers can help create your next product. This book tells you how. bull; From credit cards to tomato sauce to printers, this book will help companies understand which products, and which marketing messages, their buyers will respond to. bull; The author is the person who literally created the mustard shelf and let sellers and buyers know there was life beyond the bright yellow version. bull; Examines both established uses of RDE as well as revolutionary uses.

Author Biography

Howard Moskowitz is President and CEO of Moskowitz Jacobs Inc. He is a well-known experimental psychologist in the field of psychophysics and an inventor of world-class market research technology. Widely published in the scientific press, Dr. Moskowitz is known worldwide as the leading thinker and creator of advanced research technology in the area of new product and concept development.

 

His background includes a Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from Harvard University and seven years as a Senior Scientist at the U.S. Army Natick Laboratories. In July 2004, he was elected as an IFT Fellow for his contributions in the field of food science and technology. He was also awarded the American Marketing Association’s 2005 Charles Coolidge Parlin Marketing Research Award, regarded as the “Nobel Prize” of the market research industry.

 

Dr. Moskowitz has spoken widely at both scientific and market research conferences, and guest-lectured at leading business schools including Wharton, Harvard, Yale, and the University of Texas at Austin. He also appeared weekly from 2004-2006 on ABC News Now as The Food Doctor, highlighting the food industry’s most exciting innovations.

 

Alex Gofman, VP and CTO of Moskowitz Jacobs Inc., is the architect of several globally-recognized market research technologies and holds multiple patents. Widely published in the scientific press on the topics of technology-oriented experimental psychology, he has led new methodologies and algorithms development as well as other aspects of MJI operations since joining the firm in 1992, and is lead developer and architect of its IdeaMap® family of products. He holds a BS and a MS in Computer Science from Donetsk National Technical University, where he graduated Summa Cum Laude in 1981.

Table of Contents

Making money	p. 17
Hewlett-Packard shifts gears	p. 19
Maxwell House's calculus of coffee	p. 27
Dialing up delicious : major discoveries from Vlasic and Prego	p. 47
How to make people feel good even when they pay more	p. 65
Discover more about your competitors than they themselves know - legally!	p. 87
Making the future	p. 105
Rubik's cube of consumer electronics innovation	p. 107
Bridging cool design with hot science	p. 125
Flying to Venus	p. 153
Mind genomics : consumer mind "on the shelf"	p. 155
Making the president and public communications into "products"	p. 183
RDE defeats Murphy's Law and "bares" the stock markets	p. 205
Asia Calling, LTD. : the China angle	p. 225
RDE'S "brave new world!"	p. 235
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Foreword Foreword Welcome to the brave new world, where science and knowledge meet, and perhaps give thestatus quoa run for its money. This book is about Rule Developing Experimentation (RDE)--a business process with which a company can know more about customers than many think even possible. That information sheds light on what the company has to do to ride the wave, get the next set of customers, and then anticipate the future. Armed with these new information-gathering tools, a company can find out what turns on their current and potential new customers, insightfully create new products, successfully launch them, and happily grab market share from the competitors. Imagine this as the world for generations to come--where what youaremeans less than what youcan betomorrow, and what you can be tomorrow becomes increasingly simpler to achieve for a company so determined. So with this vision of what the world's going to be like, let's return toSelling Blue Elephants. Moskowitz and Gofman are experienced in this world where in order to survive, businesses must understand the customers' needs, both current and not yet thought of. Translating them into successful business rules virtually overnight--and at the same time doing it inexpensively--is something that was unimaginable just a few years ago. The authors have managed to systematize the approach so any business person can take advantage of it whenever needed. This is not one of those dreary handbooks or over-simplified manuals for people feeling challenged in marketing, product development, and so on. Howard and Alex have struck a beautiful balance; a readable scientific foundation free from mind-numbing and deep statistical excursions; a balance of hands-on experience without making the reader feel boot-camped or even coached; and principles plus case histories that are downright entertaining, informative, and educational. The book leads you on a captivating journey with each chapter introducing gradually more and more useful details about RDE widely applied from food product development to political campaigns, from advertisement to stock market predictions, from driving innovation to package and magazine cover design. And the list goes on. By the end of the book you realize you are ready to try it yourself. It is deep enough in details to let the reader jump-start RDE immediately, and at the same time general enough to stimulate a search for new applications. When I started reading their work, I was amazed that companies could actually learn so much by systematic variation. It was surprising to me, who had grown up in a world of smart and systematic thinkers. We used some of these approaches when I worked closely with the founder of Schwab.com, but not to the extent, nor with the same rigor that our authors have done. We survived and grew, but we could have done things far faster and better than we did had we had the blueprint from experimentation. When it came time to apply this approach in our study and book,Success Built to Last: Creating a Life that Matters, we got a chance to use the systematic experimentation that our authors promote. It worked like a charm, and confirmed in two weeks of "scientific work" those insights that we had found in a couple of years of interviews. We authors were convinced, and in fact so convinced that we wrote up the chapter about RDE as the final "methods" chapter in our book. One of the traditional questions of any foreword iswho is this book written for?WithSelling Blue Elephants, this is a tricky question. On one hand, brand managers, advertising specialists, product developers, marketers and market researchers, designers, communications professionals, and of course students will clearly benefit from reading this book and applying RDE