Consumer Packaged Goods

01 Oct

Posted at 01:40h in Category Management, Consumer Packaged Goods, Jim Embry, Market Segment, Retailing, Sku optimization, Top by
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World Class Category Management for the consumer packaged goods sector. Category Management should always be concerned with asking, "What are your distribution experts delivering?" [caption id="attachment_1983" align="alignright" width="300"] category management[/caption] Consider how ‘one-off’ savings initiatives do not address systemic root cause issues when dealing with total cost of ownership challenges. Your...

19 Jan

Posted at 01:30h in Consumer Packaged Goods, Internet Marketing, Social Networking by
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Is social media driving tech accessories purchases? The answer, at this point seems to be “yes and no,’” according to Chris Ely, manager, Industry Analysis Market Research for the Consumer Electronics (CE) Association, who outlined the results of a new study during the “Tech Accessories in...

20 Dec

Posted at 07:21h in Consumer Packaged Goods by
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Successful Consumer Packed Goods Marketers Must Remember: Content Beats Flashy Shiny Stuff

A great story from Doug Garnett's Blog Here’s an important tech axiom: Software Developers have far more interest in applying application bells and whistles than people have in using them.

I learned this success lesson on my first project out of college.

In that project I designed a network of Apple 2′s to display wire wrap harness instructions for avionics assembly at General Dynamics. (To be clear…while today I’m in advertising, back then I was a software engineer with a degree in mathematics. Gotta love how life deals our hands.)

Successful People all around me were saying that;

 “Apple offers color so this project needs to use it”. And, when I noted Apple’s spec that we lost half our resolution instantly, they responded with soft-logic theories that the increased information from color would make up for that loss. But the spec wasn’t entirely honest. Once I decoded the Apple II display it turned out the spec was only accurate if we restricted ourselves to 3 colors (2 + black). But if we used 8, we would drop our horizontal resolution by 8 and vertical resolution by 4 to 16 times. (This rookie analysis apparently impressed my boss and we worked in green & black.) More importantly, it was the right choice for the human equation we were working with. Wire harnesses for a cruise missile were assembled by people and required accurate connections for large bundles of wires. It goes without saying that making an interface that didn’t respect the workers just to apply the sexiness of color would have hurt product & reliability for…um… well…missiles tipped with powerful explosives (sometimes even nuclear).