Kenna's Dilemma

This post is about the chapter titled Kenna’s Dilemma from Malcom Gladwell’s book. After reading through the chapter, I found two main issues to take into account when marketing products and testing them.

The first lesson I found reasonably interesting is: “It’s exactly the same product, but a different set of sensations have been transferred from the bottle, which in this case is not necessarily a good thing.” (3. The blind leading the blind. Pg. 163). This fragment belongs to 7-Up case, when they added 15% yellow color to the bottle and people started thinking that it had a lot more lime or lemon.

When I think about this sentence, I realize that marketers can always play with consumer’s minds, trying to sell what they want to sell using hundreds of tactics. The implications for marketers in this case would be to understand what the consumer really values about the product and try to enhance it as much as possible to sell as much as possible.

There is a very famous case study in Catalunya directly related to transferring a different set of sensations thanks to marketing. Juve&Camps was a catalan champagne brand (champagne is called Cava in Catalunya) that was not performing very well in the mid 90’s because it was a low end product sold between 4$ to 6$. One day, the CEO woke up and decided to change totally his product. He wrote a letter calling to a meeting the 100 best sommeliers in Catalunya. Once they were all together Juve&Camps’ CEO proposed them to create the best Cava ever, all he needed was the sommeliers to work together in developing the best grape to come up with the best carbonated beverage.

Two years later they came up with the new product, new name (Juve&Camps) and a new story to tell when selling the product. At that moment, they needed to market the product. The strategy was so easy because the best 100 sommeliers in Catalunya would recommend their own product (we have to remember that they have developed the product). Then, people after tasting the product through a recommendation of a well-known sommelier, they will try to find the product in supermarkets or specialty stores. Juve&Camps decided not to market the product at the very first because supermarkets would be willing to give them more space because of the increasing demand. Finally, they started selling what is called a premium product focused on special celebrations and targeted to young to middle age people with a high-medium purchasing power. What is important to stress here is that the product itself was good, but what triggered sales was the story and the packaging of the product. Whenever you can tell a good story of a product, the product sells better because you are transferring a different set of sensations through colors, words and smells.

The second lesson I would like to stress is: “When you are in the product development world, you become immersed in your own stuff, and it’s hard to keep in mind the fact that consumers you go out and see spend very little time with your product. They know the experience of it then and there. But they don’t have any history with it, and it’s hard for them to imagine a future with it, especially if it’s something very different.” (pg 173).

Marketers should know before launching a breakthrough that consumers are not used to it, because thinking that they would understand without having any experience is a clear flop. Normally, when we develop a breakthrough, such as Aeron or the car that Ford developed before all other car manufacturers, we may know that consumers won’t be able to imagine a future with this product and here is where marketers have to play their role. It is said in marketing books that the first phase of the product life cycle has to focus on building links between the real product and similarities with consumers’ life. A very clear example of that is what AUDI did when they were starting to produce cars that used Quattro drive motion.

Last year in my Marketing Strategy class back in Spain we analized all AUDI advertisings. We realized that the first advertisements were totally focused on promoting this new feature called Quattro, but they were promoting it always using comparisons. I post an advertisement where you can appreciate how they did it (it is on spanish, but you can see it graphically). What I want to show with this lesson is that consumers need to link the product with something known, because if we don’t do it like this we’d face rejection at the first stages of the product selling process.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HT_actZK8bc

Finally, I would like to conclude my post with a summarizing reflection. When we are marketing products we must have developed a story behind the product so as to be able to gain customer’s insights. As we are developing unknown products we have to have links between the product and consumer’s life and as we are developing known products but using different approaches, we must  have developed stories and strategies to let them know that the product can satisfy their needs in a different way.