The Hindu Business Line : Museum of Misteaks

"How feeble corporate history can be! Over time, few managers can even remember some of the flops in their company's history, much less recall the reasons why they flopped. "

Okay! Heads, it's a new and vastly improved product. Tails,it's the same old trusted one." _ RAVIKANTH

Sometime in life I plan on a pilgrimage to a grey Ithaca warehouse that is, in one sense at least, a makeshift museum of modern art. Many years ago, I read about this fascinating place in the Johns Hopkins Magazine, and was immediately captivated by the concept.

The pet project of Robert McMath, the warehouse apparently houses some 65,000 exhibits (down from 80,000 after a raccoon attack. This was in 1999 - by now the sagging shelves must have a few more additions). It looks like a supermarket, but its shelves hold only one of each product. Each exhibit stands mute testimony to marketing optimism and also proof of the capriciousness of the Goddess of New Product Failure.

For over 40 years, McMath has been collecting these examples of "fads, flops, and forward-thinking products" and storing them in what he has appropriately called the `New Products Showcase & Learning Center.' "In the 1950s, there were 6,000 to 7,000 new products a year. Now there are 25,000," McMath is quoted as saying. "The '50s were the beginning of the affluent years."

At the turn of the century, the museum, dubbed the "Smithsonian for Stinkers," by Business Week had 1,489 fruit beverages, 1,435 condiments, 3,403 frozen food packages, 733 varieties of plain old water, 2,592 hair products, 758 deodorant/anti-perspirants, 3,910 types of sauces, and 3,044 snacks, 115 varieties of peanut butter and 55 styles of canned pâté. Not to mention rows of brands of shoe inserts, razors, mayonnaise, toothpaste, laundry detergent ...

You can wander through the aisles of this unlikely showcase of marketing history, gazing at launches that went awry. Of course, 20-20 hindsight lends perfect understanding in post-mortems of the marketing kind, yet, for the serious researcher this monument to marketing failure offers an amazing opportunity to examine what worked, what went wrong, and why.

Recently, I worked on a new product audit of a large consumer products company. The idea was to examine what its hit rate was in new product development: how many were successes, how many failures, what went wrong, what worked, and why. What fascinates me as I do this in organisation after organisation, is how feeble corporate history can be. Few in the team had an idea of how many launches there had been over a five-year period; fewer still had any considered viewpoint on the impact of these launches, especially the flops.

Very few Indian companies have the habit of documenting their new product failures - most adopt what I call the Persian Carpet Manoeuvre - sweep the flops away under the carpet, and hope that no one rolls it up. It's a myopic philosophy, as only by airing your mistakes for everyone to see and examine, can you learn from them.

Remember that hoary old saying — "Those who do not study history are condemned to repeat it"? This is particularly true in new product introduction. McMath calls this "corporate Alzheimer's" - over time, few managers can even remember some of the flops in their organisation's history, much less recall the reasons why they flopped. McMath collects the marketing flotsam and jetsam that their creators would like to forget, which is why his collection is often better than the launcher's own archives.

And then, how about other peoples' flops? Imagine such a storehouse for Indian products - where you could wander in and test your proposed plan against what has already been, and to bounce off your thoughts with an expert who knows the history of each one intimately. Is your idea really new and differentiated, or does it suffer from the "been there, done that" syndrome? Do your new product plans harbour some obvious (not to you) flaws that you would notice if you examined the sad history of its ancestors? In a museum of misteaks of this depth, and a curator this well informed, you could do a first-cut evaluation of your idea's probability of success, and emerge with some clarity of important issues to be tackled before you take it forward.

Imagine the saving on badly applied resources: the aggregate cost to the companies that introduced products in McMath's collection is estimated to have been $8 billion. A museum like this is only as good as its curator - when O&M bought out his business for a Marketing Intelligence Service, they had to sell it back - they didn't know what to do with the items: devoid of the product histories that go with them, these are merely warehoused items, not stories of success and failure. It only goes to accentuate the need for documentation, to transfer knowledge from the individual to the collective. Of course, to the cautious innovator, the existence of such a museum can be demoralising by providing evidence of the lack of newness. Imagine visiting and finding out that every idea you had was something that had already been done before. Imagine that.

In 1998, McMath wrote a book on the learnings acquired from a lifetime devoted to the study of new product failure: What Were They Thinking? Marketing Lessons I've Learned from over 80,000 New-Product Innovations and Idiocies. From his experiences, McMath evolved some useful tips on foretelling flops - a kind of a checklist that could help improve the odds. I thought about them and about some of the unsuccessful products in Indian competitive history and added some more tips to his list. Mind you, none of these are exactly rocket-science in their insights: yet, there are so many launches that have gone against them that maybe they are not that obvious after all.