Perception matters

Having a great product is important. But that’s just half the battle — how people perceive your product is equally as important. Here’s a few examples of how marketing turned duds into studs, off the top of my head:

Bad Robot

Honda wanted to release robot toy to consumers. But the programming sucked — when it worked properly, it followed your voice instructions, but often times it’d do nothing, or something completely different; it was entirely erratic. What kind of piece-of-shit robot is this? It doesn’t work properly! Unsurprisingly, it tested very poorly with their consumer groups.

Honda didn’t have time to fix it the programming. But they did one thing that turned this dud into a sold-out phenomenon. What did they do? They rebranded it as a robot “pet.” It still worked the same — people had to issue commands multiple times to get the toy to do anything, but now their expectations were different. What used to be “shit programming” now became “personality” — just like real pets who don’t listen!

Italian Wives

Swiffer was selling great in the United States, so Procter and Gamble expected comparable performance when it was released in Italy. But nobody bought it. It’s an amazing tool that picked up dirt like a champ — why wasn’t it selling?

You see, Italian wives take great pride in housework, and they often socialized over tips on how to clean, cook, and take care of the family. And the Swiffer, branded as a cleaning tool, was very effective. So effective and easy to use, in fact, that it devalued their work. It was too good! Procter and Gamble, knowing this, rebranded it was a “touch-up” tool — something you’d use to spot-clean after the heavy lifting, and it worked! Italian wives, now no longer feeling threatened, used Swiffer as an auxiliary part of their cleaning arsenal.

Odors

Febreeze is a wonderful product — spray it on anything it smells great! Early in its development, their team received heartfelt letters of gratitude about their product, one of which was from a women who worked as a Park Ranger and often smelled like skunk — Febreeze saved her social life! With support, Procter and Gamble continued its development, but could not find a way to market it in a way that would resonate it with consumers — after all — buying Febreeze would be admitting you are unclean, that you have odors. Furthermore, the marketing team discovered that people did not even perceive their own odors to be a problem — you don’t smell yourself! Uh-oh. How did Febreeze grow to be a billion dollar brand?

Febreeze became a success when it was marketed not as an odor killer, but rather something consumer would spray after cleaning to “freshen up.” People were willing to pay for a little reward, and over time, this slowly became ritual, sprouting millions of repeat buyers! The utility of odor killing became a secondary sell.

This was written as part of project 365, where I had been writing daily. Now I just write whenever the fuck I feel like.