Customer Reviews

Selling Blue Elephants: How to make great products that people want BEFORE they even know they want them .

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
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1 star:		(3)

 

 

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.

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."

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.

This book is about using a systematic way to develop experiments, systematically gather the results of those experiments, and to intelligently analyze them to develop rules for use in product development, marketing programs, and even communications. This method they call RDE (Rule Developing Experimentation). The authors do not claim that this is a new idea, but rather that they have a better way of explaining it and demonstrating its power.

They use business stories of developing new products for Maxwell House coffee, Prego spaghetti sauce, Vlassic pickles, and a variety of marketing programs to demonstrate what they are showing us. The authors, Howard Moskowitz and Alex Gofman, write clearly and with a great deal of conviction. My guess is that you will either find their style infectious or, if you are of a cynical bent, it will trigger a bit of naysayer in you.

The basic steps to their method are:
1) Think about the problem and identify groups of features.
2) Mix and match the elements according to a special experimental design
3) Analyze the results gleaned from the experiments
4) Optimize according to the highest sum of utilities
5) Apply the generated rules to create new products, offerings, marketing programs, etc.

Too often we grope in the dark looking for a bolt of lightening to flash out of the sky and show us the best way to compete in our market space. It rarely happens. Even with this method, most of the experiments will prove something one shouldn't do. However, something will have been learned, one will know more about the boundaries beyond which there be monsters, and one will gain more insight and skill in setting up future experiments.

It seems convincing to me that this method can save time, money, and competitive position over the usually used random guesses that can consume entire companies when they are really wrong. The authors say that this can replace the facilitated focus group because they are a flawed method. While that might well be true, I can tell for sure that one can implement this methodology in a flawed way, as well. So, we should always be careful in how we use our tools and hesitate to blame the tool for using it improperly.

Interesting.

When I first saw the title of this book, I was reminded of a skit I once saw featuring ventriloquist Edgar Bergin and Charley McCarthy. Charley asks Bergin "How do you kill a blue elephant?" and when Bergin asks the question, Charley's response is "Shoot him with a blue elephant gun." Charley then asks Bergin "How do you kill a pink elephant?" and after the straight line from Bergin, Charley's response is, "Squeeze him until he turns blue and then shoot him with a blue elephant gun." I laughed when I saw that memorable comedy bit and the fact that I can remember it decades later is an indication of how much of an imprint it made on me.
The incongruity of that comedy bit has relevance to the message that the authors of this book are trying to make. Sometimes the making of a great new product is nothing more than taking an existing product (the pink elephant) and squeezing it so that it looks like a new product (the blue elephant). However, before that you need to know if there is a substantial market for the new product.
In this book, the authors demonstrate a tactic that can be used to explore the possibilities for new products. It is called Rule Developing Experimentation (RDE) and it is a systematic process to develop and test new ideas for products or different ways to modify existing products to make them more desirable. The particular emphasis is on the development for a product that the potential market does not yet realize that it would want. As all marketing directors understand so well, this is an inherently complex problem.
Nearly all businesses want to expand, and there is only two ways to do that. You can either sell more of your existing product line or develop new products. The strategy for the second requires a significant amount of predictive ability, which can only be generated by detailed study. The RDE process is a sound business strategy that can be applied almost anywhere. Several case studies of specific products are presented as examples of how things can be done, although the general tactics used are not specific to the product.
If you have just attended a meeting where the CEO has said that your company must introduce new and profitable products quickly and you are responsible for it, there are two things that you should do.

*) Sit down and take a few deep and relaxing breaths.
*) Reach for this book.

Both actions will help you solve the problem

What is this magic RDE (Rule developing Experimentation)? How this should really work is not explained in this book. That RDE does not work is even confirmed in the book "great products only can come from great developpers" and that "customers do not really know what they want". What I understand from this book is that RDE defines new products based on criteria the company sorts out for themselves. Subsequently these products are tested.It is only usable for fast moving consumer goods resulting in big line extensions. Is that what we need? RDE is the solution to everything; "we analysed it with RDE, the solution was retrieved through RDE, we did it according to the RDE principle". It remains a mistery however what this RDE exactly is and how you use it. It is clear to me that Blue Elefants do not exist and that RDE is a bunch of rubbish. Worst business book read in years.

One of the toughest challenges that companies face is developing new products and services as well as spurring innovation of existing lines. Further confounding that reality is the fact that blockbuster successes typically aren't generated out of surveys, focus groups or product testing - because consumers typically don't purchase or behave the way they say they will to facilitators. The book Selling Blue Elephants introduces a novel approach designed to minimize wasted resources, guesswork as well as trial-and-error activities usually associated with research and development. The authors dub this new process - Rule Developing Experimentation (RDE) - claiming RDE is the first quantifiable, formal and repeatable attempt at true experimentation in a business context. In the book, RDE's creators show how the systemized process works, as well as how it has produced successes at companies such as MasterCard, Campbell Soup Co. and Hewlett Packard. Soundview believes this is an intriguing book that can benefit any company faced with a need to innovate within a resource-constrained environment - which pretty much means every company.

The authors argue Rule Developing Experimentation (RDE) is the key to developing new products.

Unfortunately for shareholders, during the past 15 years marketers have dominated product development. The result: more than 90 per cent of product launches and re-launches fail.

RDE is a process of designing, testing and modifying alternative ideas, packages, products, or services. It is disciplined. It reveals to the developer and marketer what appeals to the customer, even if the customer can't articulate the need.

It contains seven steps:

1. Consider the problem; identify features that may comprise solutions.
2. Mix and match the features in experimental designs.
3. Show the prototypes to consumers.
4. Analyze their reactions.
5. Optimize your prototypes.
6. Identify attitudinal population segments.
7. Apply the rules to create new products.

Howard Moskowitz is experimental psychologist in the field of psychophysics. Alex Gofman is widely published, technology-oriented experimental psychologist. They argue RDE delivers cost-effective actionable results tied to business directives. As a shareholder, I argue, RDE is worth a try.

I was disappointed in this book. Wasn't worth the $15.00 I paid, let a lone the $28.00 retail price so many probably paid. Very simple concept that could have been explained in one small chapter, not a whole book. I was bored to tears and kept looking for something else to explain why I bought the book. Great title and interesting chapter titles but did little to give me applicable information beyond the simplistic "RDE" concept. I kept saying, "Ok, ok I got it" and expected more - but there wasn't anymore. Find out what RDE is online and save your money regarding the purchase of the book.

Selling Blue Elelphants. How to make great products that people want before they even know they want them.Moskowitz & Gofman. 2007. ISBN 0136136680. This is a very important book. It should finally put a bullet into money wasting focus groups. This is the applicationo of the scientific method to product development with a high tech web tool. Prodcys reange form consumer, hiugh tech, services, teh US President, stocks, competitive analysis - it is a very thorough treatment. The truth is people do not know what they prefer if they have not exerienced it. Previous work in this area promised bland and mediocre. These two marketing scientists have written a definitive work in this area.
From the cover it does show the following

* 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

It is an important book. But, it is tiresome to read. Each chapter starts out brilliantly and then it drops numbingly into the data. I would have put most of the data in appendices. If you can get through it the results you can bring to your firm that are worth it and save time and money.