Home > Store > Marketing > Marketing
Selling Blue Elephants: How to make great products that people want BEFORE they even know they want them
- By Howard R. Moskowitz, Alex Gofman
- Published Apr 11, 2007 by Pearson Prentice Hall.
- Copyright 2007
- Dimensions: 6x9
- Pages: 272
- Edition: 1st
- Book
- ISBN-10: 0-13-613668-0
- ISBN-13: 978-0-13-613668-2
- eBook (Adobe DRM)
- ISBN-10: 0-13-235297-4
- ISBN-13: 978-0-13-235297-0
Register your product to gain access to bonus material or receive a coupon.
Product Author Bios
Howard Moskowitz is President and CEO of Moskowitz Jacobs Inc. He is a well-known experimental psychologist in the field of psychophysics and an inventor of world-class market research technology. Widely published in the scientific press, Dr. Moskowitz is known worldwide as the leading thinker and creator of advanced research technology in the area of new product and concept development.
His background includes a Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from Harvard University and seven years as a Senior Scientist at the U.S. Army Natick Laboratories. In July 2004, he was elected as an IFT Fellow for his contributions in the field of food science and technology. He was also awarded the American Marketing Association’s 2005 Charles Coolidge Parlin Marketing Research Award, regarded as the “Nobel Prize” of the market research industry.
Dr. Moskowitz has spoken widely at both scientific and market research conferences, and guest-lectured at leading business schools including Wharton, Harvard, Yale, and the University of Texas at Austin. He also appeared weekly from 2004-2006 on ABC News Now as The Food Doctor, highlighting the food industry’s most exciting innovations.
Alex Gofman, VP and CTO of Moskowitz Jacobs Inc., is the architect of several globally-recognized market research technologies and holds multiple patents. Widely published in the scientific press on the topics of technology-oriented experimental psychology, he has led new methodologies and algorithms development as well as other aspects of MJI operations since joining the firm in 1992, and is lead developer and architect of its IdeaMap® family of products. He holds a BS and a MS in Computer Science from Donetsk National Technical University, where he graduated Summa Cum Laude in 1981.
Really great products and really huge successes don’t come from focus groups! And if you simply rely on trial and error, or guesswork, you’ll lose far more often than you’ll win. Now, there’s a solution: Rule Developing Experimentation (RDE), the first systematized, disciplined, solution-oriented business process of experimentation.
In Selling Blue Elephants, RDE’s creators reveal how to systematically design, test, and modify alternative ideas, packages, products, and services, to discover offerings your customers will be passionate about...even if they can’t articulate the need, much less the solution!
Discover the seven easy steps that take you from cluelessness to clarity in just days... sometimes even hours. Watch RDE succeeding in companies ranging from Hewlett-Packard to Campbell’s, MasterCard to Maxwell House... and learn how to get the same outstanding results yourself, one step at a time, every time!
- Discover “how the world works” in your market
- Reveal the hidden rules that define your next breakthrough product
- Create prototypes that answer the right questions, fast
- Get at the truths your customers don’t know how to tell you
- Use automated tools to streamline the entire process
- Streamline your research, and get actionable answers in just days
- Extend RDE value throughout the enterprise
- From messaging to corporate communications to investor behavior
Related Articles
Exploratory Research: A Backdoor to Consumer Insights?
Exploring Perception of Food Packages with Rule Developing Experimentation and Eye Tracking
Improving the "Stickiness" of Your Website, Part 2: If They Like A and B, Would They Like "A+B"?
Improving the ‘Stickiness’ of Your Website
Pick Me! Pick Me! How to Make Marketing Offers That Stand Out from the Crowd
Structured Experimentation in Package Design
Author's Site
Visit the author's web site: www.SellingBlueElephants.com
|
13 of 13 people found the following review helpful
Informative but blatantly self-serving, By
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Selling Blue Elephants: How to make great products that people want BEFORE they even know they want them . (Hardcover)
I liked this book and learned a lot about a market-research technique that I had hoped might apply to the needs of a small business-to-business company. The book made me enthusiastic about the potential to test product concepts before we spend a lot of money taking final products to market. The approach the authors advocate appears to be able to dramatically reduce risk for companies that are trying to get their offering right. The focus of the book is primarily on consumer-goods companies and their products, though the technique has also be used for B2B offerings.As I got into the book, I was disappointed that the only practical advice the authors offer is to contact them about using their on-line research tool. Good as their tool may be, it appears not to be well suited for the needs of my small B2B business. I now feel I've paid about $20 for the authors' elaborate marketing brochure, and I have no way to apply what I learned unless I choose to work with... Read more
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Waste of Time and Money, By
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Selling Blue Elephants: How to make great products that people want BEFORE they even know they want them . (Hardcover)
This book should have been great. It is about a critical subject (using testing to drive product and marketing choices to better serve/target market segments) and has a pioneer of the field as a co-author. I was predisposed to love it. But Selling Blue Elephants is a complete waste of time. As another reviewer wrote, it is just a blatant promotion for their testing services - and a bad one at that.Now you might say "Isn't every book just a means to get the author consulting business?" That may be true, but usually the book in question still stands on its own. This book tells stories of companies using the author's RDE testing approach without conveying any information the reader can actually use or learn from without hiring the authors firm. I get RDE helped Prego come up with chunky sauce. But how? That Vlasic created variants of a basic pickle to better appeal to multiple segments. Again, how? In discussing how RDE can help dissect your competitors products,... Read more
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Quantifying Blue Oceans and Long Tails in Stepwise Fashion, By
This review is from: Selling Blue Elephants: How to make great products that people want BEFORE they even know they want them . (Hardcover)
The concept of Rule Developing Experimentation (RDE) should prove intriguing enough for any marketing manager looking to dive into the "blue ocean" of unstructured demand and untapped market space. The varying definitions of that ocean have led to RDE, the subject of this illuminating though somewhat presumptive book by market research mavens Howard Moskowitz and Alex Gofman. The source area of study will be familiar to anyone who has read W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne's Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant and Chris Anderson's The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More, both works reflecting authors who feel that any...
Read more
|
Online Sample Chapter
Table of Contents
FOREWORD xi
ABOUT THE AUTHORS xiii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xv
INTRODUCTION 1
PART 1 MAKING MONEY 17
CHAPTER 1 HEWLETT-PACKARD SHIFTS GEARS 19
CHAPTER 2 MAXWELL HOUSE’S CALCULUS OF COFFEE 27
CHAPTER 3 DIALING UP DELICIOUS: MAJOR DISCOVERIES FROM VLASIC AND PREGO 47
CHAPTER 4 HOW TO MAKE PEOPLE FEEL GOOD EVEN WHEN THEY PAY MORE 65
CHAPTER 5 DISCOVER MORE ABOUT YOUR COMPETITORS THAN THEY THEMSELVES KNOW—LEGALLY! 87
PART 2 MAKING THE FUTURE 105
CHAPTER 6 RUBIK’S CUBE OF CONSUMER ELECTRONICS INNOVATION 107
CHAPTER 7 BRIDGING COOL DESIGN WITH HOT SCIENCE 125
PART 3 FLYING TO VENUS 153
CHAPTER 8 MIND GENOMICS: CONSUMER MIND “ON THE SHELF” 155
CHAPTER 9 MAKING THE PRESIDENT AND PUBLIC COMMUNICATIONS INTO “PRODUCTS” 183
CHAPTER 10 RDE DEFEATS MURPHY’S LAW AND “BARES” THE STOCK MARKETS 205
CHAPTER 11 ASIA CALLING, LTD.: THE CHINA ANGLE 225
CHAPTER 12 RDE’S “BRAVE NEW WORLD!” 235
EPILOGUE 239
INDEX 241
Foreword
Introduction
Sample Pages
Download the sample pages (includes Introduction, Foreword, and Index)
Book
This product currently is not for sale.
eBook (Adobe DRM)
$32.99
$26.39
This eBook requires the free Adobe® Digital Editions software.
Before downloading this DRM-encrypted PDF, be sure to:
- Install the free Adobe Digital Editions software on your machine. Adobe Digital Editions only works on Macintosh and Windows, and requires the Adobe Flash Player. Please see the official system requirements.
- Authorize your copy of Adobe Digital Editions using your Adobe ID. If you don't already have an Adobe ID, you can create one here.
Get access to thousands of books and training videos about technology, professional development and digital media from more than 40 leading publishers, including Addison-Wesley, Prentice Hall, Cisco Press, IBM Press, O'Reilly Media, Wrox, Apress, and many more. If you continue your subscription after your 30-day trial, you can receive 30% off a monthly subscription to the Safari Library for up to 12 months. That's a total savings of $199.
