Mills on Marketing

Assumptions are the mother of all stuff ups.

All companies continue to pay for making the wrong assumptions about customers.

Proctor and Gamble (P&G), one of the world’s largest and most profitable consumer companies, recently launched its highly successful Swiffer Wet Mop in Italy.

P&G researched the Italian market. Italians spend an average of 21 hours a week on household chores. Americans spend just four hours on similar chores. Italians wash their kitchen floors and bathroom four times a week or more, compared to American’s who wash their floor just once a week.

So how come the Swiffer flopped? P&G sold Swiffer as a labor saving convenience which turned out to be a big turnoff for Italians.

Italian women prefer products that are tough cleaners, not timesavers.

Italian women didn’t believe the Swiffer was tough enough for mopping, so they used the Swiffer for polishing, rather than mopping.

P&G learned from their mistake. They launched the Swiffer Duster which did a light job well with timesaving convenience. Sales took off. Italy is now the biggest European market for Swiffer.

This story taken from Robert H. Bloom’s book The Inside Advantage underscores two vitally important lessons about customers.

“First and most obvious, what works in one market or with one customer does not work with others. One size does not fit all…Second and even more important, it’s not enough to define your customer as a market statistic.”

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Sydney Finkelstein, author of best-selling books Why Smart Executives Fail and Breakout Strategy, tells the story of a construction company that had completed a project for a private school, which was the first part of a multi-million dollar master plan that had not yet been awarded.

The project had been completed without a hitch and the client was “ecstatic”, which boded well for the construction company getting the major part of the construction project as well.

However, the school was having problems with a doorknob and workmen came a couple of times to fix it. But they never replaced it.

One day, it came off in somebody’s hand and locked him in the office.

The trapped man happened to be the person who would award the master plan contract.

The CEO of the construction company now has that doorknob on a plaque in his office, labeled “The $10 million doorknob”.

No need to explain why.

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It doesn’t take long for businesses who fail to deliver what customers want to suffer disastrous decline.

Remember when Japan was the world’s exemplar for business success? in 1994, Japan had 149 corporations listed in the Global 500 with $38 trillion in total sales. Then, sales plummeted to 82 corporations with $2.2 trillion in sales in 2004.

Failure to adapt to changing markets spells disastrous for firms and nations alike.

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