Can you remember the world before the iPod? How about the world before chunky tomato sauce or brown mustard? Many of these products came about not through focus groups and polling, but rather through research and development labs and marketers developing the products they knew customers would want, before customers knew they wanted them. Today your customers can actually help you create your next product. Rule Developing Experimentation (RDE) is a solution-oriented learning experience. RDE is the systematized process of designing, testing and modifying alternative ideas, packages, products, or services in a disciplined way so that the developer and marketer discover what appeals to the customer, even if the customer can't articulate the need, much less the solution. The book begins by presenting best practices in the RDE from some of today's top companies: HP, Prego, Vlasic, and Mastercard. It then goes on to examine RDEs use in innovation and design, and goes on to examine its possible uses in the international, political, bioinformatics, and finance areas. Filled with real-life stories, this book will change the way people think about selling to their present and future customers.
“Everyone thinks they need to break rules, but Moskowitz and Gofman skillfully show us how to develop and use the rules to define new perspectives and make better business decisions in virtually any field. An absolute must-read for any businessperson facing fierce competition!”
—Sean Bauld, Executive Vice President, Global Head of Marketing, Sales & Trading, Reuters
“Over the last 15 years significant shareholder value has been destroyed by ‘insightful and creative’ marketers resulting in the shocking statistic that more than 90% of launches and re-launches do fail. Moskowitz and Gofman are serious geniuses who have dedicated their work to help all of us increase our chances of success significantly. RDE is a new tool that all marketers should acquire if they love their profession and are serious about creating shareholder value out of every launch.”
—Tex Gunning, Group Vice President, Unilever Asia
“In a series of well-written and engaging examples, Moskowitz and Gofman vividly illustrate the value of a truly scientific approach to understanding what consumers really want. But more than that, they show how experimentation is not only the spice of life, but can spice up all of our lives.
This book is as much fun to read as it is informative, and it is as deeply rooted in psychology as it is in the science of marketing. They really deliver the goods!”
—Professor Stephen Kosslyn, Chair, Psychology Department, Harvard University
“We’ve been teaching business students how to understand the ‘mind of their customers’ for a long time. Finally, the ordinary reader, as well as business people, social scientists, and politicians, can share in these tools. Moskowitz and Gofman have flattened the playing field with their book Selling Blue Elephants. I applaud you both. Two thumbs up.”
—Professor Subrata Sen, Professor of Marketing, Yale University
“We are in an age of the next killer application and it is elusive. Selling Blue Elephants is an absolute must read for any business moving from strategy to execution. Howard and Alex have built a process driven engine (RDE) that delivers actionable results that have a direct tie back to business directives. Bringing reality from concept is the key ingredient to a successful business idea—Selling Blue Elephants is the cookbook.”
—Peter Tripp, Vice President, Strategic Programs Office Global Outsourcing and Infrastructure Services, UNISYS
“This book is a must read for anyone challenged with showing that systematic experimental design does not start and end in R&D but should be ingrained in the corporate mindset.”
—Dulce Paredes, PhD., Director, Consumer Sciences, Avon Products, Inc.
Really great products and really huge successes don’t come from focus groups! And if you simply rely on trial and error, or guesswork, you’ll lose far more often than you’ll win. Now, there’s a solution: Rule Developing Experimentation (RDE), the first systematized, disciplined, solution-oriented business process of experimentation.
In Selling Blue Elephants, RDE’s creators reveal how to systematically design, test, and modify alternative ideas, packages, products, and services, to discover offerings your customers will be passionate about...even if they can’t articulate the need, much less the solution!
Discover the seven easy steps that take you from cluelessness to clarity in just days... sometimes even hours. Watch RDE succeeding in companies ranging from Hewlett-Packard to Campbell’s, MasterCard to Maxwell House... and learn how to get the same outstanding results yourself, one step at a time, every time!
- Discover “how the world works” in your market
- Reveal the hidden rules that define your next breakthrough product
- Create prototypes that answer the right questions, fast
- Get at the truths your customers don’t know how to tell you
- Use automated tools to streamline the entire process
- Streamline your research, and get actionable answers in just days
- Extend RDE value throughout the enterprise
- From messaging to corporate communications to investor behavior
About the Authors
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.
Contents
FOREWORD xi
ABOUT THE AUTHORS xiii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xv
INTRODUCTION 1
PART 1 MAKING MONEY 17
CHAPTER 1 HEWLETT-PACKARD SHIFTS GEARS 19
CHAPTER 2 MAXWELL HOUSE’S CALCULUS OF COFFEE 27
CHAPTER 3 DIALING UP DELICIOUS: MAJOR DISCOVERIES FROM VLASIC AND PREGO 47
CHAPTER 4 HOW TO MAKE PEOPLE FEEL GOOD EVEN WHEN THEY PAY MORE 65
CHAPTER 5 DISCOVER MORE ABOUT YOUR COMPETITORS THAN THEY THEMSELVES KNOW—LEGALLY! 87
PART 2 MAKING THE FUTURE 105
CHAPTER 6 RUBIK’S CUBE OF CONSUMER ELECTRONICS INNOVATION 107
CHAPTER 7 BRIDGING COOL DESIGN WITH HOT SCIENCE 125
PART 3 FLYING TO VENUS 153
Frequently Bought Together
Editorial Reviews
About the Author
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.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Foreword
Welcome to the brave new world, where science and knowledge meet, and perhaps give the status quo a 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 you are means less than what you can be tomorrow, 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 to Selling 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 is who is this book written for? With Selling 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 to their respective fields. The general reading public will find much of this book fascinating. On the other hand, even the authors seem to be uncertain where the limits of the approach are. Who knows, maybe the biggest RDE success will come out of the areas only hinted at or not even touched in this book.
So, again, why is RDE so important? Quite simply, none of us in the business world really knows all the answers all the time. Oh, certainly there are some of us who can ride a winning streak, who may be connected to "what's going on right now." But as an investor and business builder, I think it's important to take a longer view. It's good to be right. And, I've learned over the years that nothing is better than knowledge. Selling Blue Elephants gives us the way to gain that knowledge about the customers' mind easily, anywhere, anytime, and for virtually any topic. The authors have, in effect, created a manifesto for change that will be equally powerful in the hands of the small business and the large corporations anywhere in the world.
Spending a big portion of my professional life trying to understand and explain to others what entails to become successful, I feel that this book and RDE may be the most useful tools on the road to success for motivated businesspeople.
Howard and Alex have put together a really captivating book. They've woven together stories about business successes in a way that I as a businessman and investor find fascinating.
—Mark Thompson
Executive coach and management advisor, and co-author of the international bestseller Success Built to Last
© Copyright Pearson Education. All rights reserved.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Informative but blatantly self-serving,
By
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Selling Blue Elephants: How to make great products that people want BEFORE they even know they want them . (Hardcover)
I liked this book and learned a lot about a market-research technique that I had hoped might apply to the needs of a small business-to-business company. The book made me enthusiastic about the potential to test product concepts before we spend a lot of money taking final products to market. The approach the authors advocate appears to be able to dramatically reduce risk for companies that are trying to get their offering right. The focus of the book is primarily on consumer-goods companies and their products, though the technique has also be used for B2B offerings.As I got into the book, I was disappointed that the only practical advice the authors offer is to contact them about using their on-line research tool. Good as their tool may be, it appears not to be well suited for the needs of my small B2B business. I now feel I've paid about $20 for the authors' elaborate marketing brochure, and I have no way to apply what I learned unless I choose to work with their company. Use of books to promote the authors' business is a consistent trend in the publication of business books. I don't object to it if the book provides real value the reader can apply even without engaging the services of the authors' company. This book fails that basic test, as do many other such books. If the trend toward self-promotion continues without regard for the lasting value a book provides to the reader, I think the entire market segment will lose credibility. By the way, in contacting the authors' company I learned that the cost of their services comes to about $10,000 per study. That's very reasonable for companies bigger or more mature than mine, but its well beyond what we can afford at our stage of growth. I'll be selling this book soon on the Amazon.com marketplace. I only wish I had bought it there.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Waste of Time and Money,
By
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Selling Blue Elephants: How to make great products that people want BEFORE they even know they want them . (Hardcover)
This book should have been great. It is about a critical subject (using testing to drive product and marketing choices to better serve/target market segments) and has a pioneer of the field as a co-author. I was predisposed to love it. But Selling Blue Elephants is a complete waste of time. As another reviewer wrote, it is just a blatant promotion for their testing services - and a bad one at that.Now you might say "Isn't every book just a means to get the author consulting business?" That may be true, but usually the book in question still stands on its own. This book tells stories of companies using the author's RDE testing approach without conveying any information the reader can actually use or learn from without hiring the authors firm. I get RDE helped Prego come up with chunky sauce. But how? That Vlasic created variants of a basic pickle to better appeal to multiple segments. Again, how? In discussing how RDE can help dissect your competitors products, how do you make statements like "Success in RDE deconstruction of the competitive frame is 80% getting the right raw materials in the first place?" and then not explain at all how the example company did this? ("raw materials" refer to the various components of that made up the competitors offering). How did HP, Vlasic, Prego, or anyone else decide what to test in the first place, who to test it on, what elements to test, what takeaways to follow-up on and what to reject, etc. None of that is covered. Instead you get the equivalent of the power point presentation given by the Underpants Gnomes Where Step 1 is "collect underpants," step 2 is blank, and step 3 is "profit." The book has continued references like "don't worry about entering all the data manually; everything is done automatically if you are using a program such as IdeaMap.NET" (which happens to be the authors' proprietary tool). There is in fact so little info on actually doing testing that should the book convince you to buy their tool, you would still need to hire them to run it for you since there is nothing on how companies came up with the inputs in terms of hypothesis, elements, etc. With due respect to Moskowitz's work as a consultant -- which if you have heard Malcolm Gladwell describe it is top notch -- Selling Blue Elephants fails as a business book has nothing to do with its sub-header "How to make great products that people want BEFORE they even know they want them."
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Quantifying Blue Oceans and Long Tails in Stepwise Fashion,
By Ed Uyeshima (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER) (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER) (VINE VOICE) (2008 HOLIDAY TEAM) (REAL NAME)
This review is from: Selling Blue Elephants: How to make great products that people want BEFORE they even know they want them . (Hardcover)
The concept of Rule Developing Experimentation (RDE) should prove intriguing enough for any marketing manager looking to dive into the "blue ocean" of unstructured demand and untapped market space. The varying definitions of that ocean have led to RDE, the subject of this illuminating though somewhat presumptive book by market research mavens Howard Moskowitz and Alex Gofman. The source area of study will be familiar to anyone who has read W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne's Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant and Chris Anderson's The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More, both works reflecting authors who feel that any venture into the great unknown requires some discipline. Using experimental psychology and adaptive management as their basis of argument, Moskowitz and Gofman offer seven steps toward successful produce launches:(1) Identify groups or classes of features that constitute the target product. (2) Mix and match the elements according to an experimental design to create a set of prototypes. (3) Show the prototypes to consumers and collect their responses on a rating question. (4) Analyze results using a regression module. (5) Uncover the optimal product by finding the best combination that has the highest sum of utilities. (6) Identify naturally occurring attitudinal segments of the population that show similar patterns of the utilities. (7) Apply the generated rules to create new products and services. The template is far easier to grasp in theory than in execution, a point validated by the co-authors who assume companies have a clear understanding of their value-add in the marketplace at a most granular level. The most challenging aspect is identifying the right breakdown of product features and then using the appropriate statistical formulas to recognize the response patterns in order to make tangible enhancements. Quantifying the process is an admirable effort by the co-authors, but it seems to apply easier to hard consumer goods than softer services. However, the more constructive argument relates to the shortcomings of the more nebulous findings to be produced from survey questions or focus group discussions, the traditional means of eliciting such customer-generated data. So much qualitative judgment, in particular, by marketing managers constrained by their own thinking, can hamper such findings as to render them next to useless, especially in an established marketplace. Moskowitz and Gofman point out how established name-brand companies who can afford to invest in RDE analysis (such as Hewlett-Packard and MasterCard) have yielded dividends from the approach. These companies typify markets that have become so saturated that the marketing leadership is forced to come up with new value propositions. This means testing a broad variety of feature combinations, and some may strike you as counterintuitive. It appears that the more combinations tested, the more actionable the findings, all of which makes this a potentially expensive methodology. The co-authors are particularly effective in showing how such thinking extends to design elements, even packaging, in order to assess a product's resonance on the marketplace. At times, I wish the co-authors would have toned down their use of superfluous jargon and their obvious pitch of ideamap.net as the source of their research software, but there is no doubt from this book that the subject of RDE is endlessly fascinating.
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