Monthly Archives: April 2020

The F-Word. But This Time We’re Talking Failure.

Ta-da, new from Colgate …

Colgate Frozen Beef Lasagna.

Perfectly normal for a toothpaste company to bring out frozen Italian food, isn’t it?

Except in 1982 nobody believed that in the least and it was considered little more than a stinker.

More to product failures, you have the worst bike ever made.

A charlatan of a bike, the Itera
Plastic Bicycle was weighty, fragile and it flexed.

 The Itera Plastic Bicycle designed in 1980 to help combat the oil crisis.

It was heavy, it was dangerously flexible, it was fragile, it was expletive deleted.

A board game karked it as well.

‘I’m Back and You’re Fired, Trump’ is famous for flopping twice, 1989 and 2004.

People weren’t exactly aglow with desire for it.

These are just a few of the exhibits in the Museum of Failure, https://museumoffailure.com.

Since 2017 it’s been the home to stuff ups, duds and no-hopers – over 100 failed products.

It’s a cheery collection of crap, as a friend on Zoom this morning put it.

Still, it’s fascinating to see what companies thought would be sought after products.

Call it a learning experience to understand how innovation went awry.

It’s a test of sorts as people can’t help asking themselves ‘would I have approved that?’

‘Of course not’, goes the answer.

In retrospect we’re all brilliant predictors of success. 

We can sniff out a duff product to avoid the accompanying discredit, right?

So you have to wonder, what sort of business mind approved the money-losing 1958 Ford Edsel.

Or a doll with alarming eyes and a pinched mouth called Little Miss No Name, developed to compete with Barbie.

Both are stars in the Museum collection.

The thing is, we’re personally invested in exceptionalism; we have an aversion to failure.

It’s reason enough we read about people like Steve Jobs, hoping some of the magic will rub off.

We look to gain something to make wiser decisions.

Well then, what about ads that are hucksterish, samey and a failure in everything but turning people off.

Why aren’t we more invested in exceptionalism for ads?

Why can’t marketers sniff out all the drawbacks?

And instead of endlessly tweaking commercials why can’t they start afresh with something called an idea?

Remember ideas?

After all, where’s the sense in being the most marvelous of all disagreeable commercials.

Certainly there’s room in the Museum of Failure for more than a few campaigns of late.

But if you have the nous to realize Colgate Beef Lasagna is iffy, why not apply that ability to evaluating TV scripts.

Fossicking for Gold.

There was a time when gold fever struck.

It sent me hunting around abandoned gold mines in places like Mudgee and Gulgong in New South Wales.

Tambaroora was another location … a ghost town.

The area had been prospected heavily in the mid-nineteenth century, but you never know.

‘You never know’ … not my words but those of a guy who sold me a complete gold panning kit — professional model.

Like every good selling proposition his message carried an element of promise.

When gold nuggets are sizable they’re given names. In 1869 one 66kg find in central Victoria was called ‘Welcome Stranger’. Turn up something like that now and you’d be all the better for four million dollars in your pocket.

Happily, we weren’t entirely luckless. A few bright yellow flakes turned up in the pan, and gorgeous they were, albeit microscopic.

No cries of Eureka that day.

It wasn’t unlike fishing for Marlin and returning home with an underweight shrimp.

All this makes me think of gold panning from another era … the Depression, when prospecting became a mode of survival for laid-off workers.

Know about that? Few do. But it could make a comeback if jobs continue to go astray with the lockdown.

In the ’30s jobless Americans with imagination and grit headed out to sift through the tailings of 1850s gold sites searching for overlooked wealth.

Utah, California, Nevada and Colorado were rife with men hunting for gold that had gone unnoticed.

Vermont as well.

It’s said there’s plenty of overlooked gold out there left by 19th century mining methods that were less than efficient.

A few gold hunters in the ’30s did find traces of color (that’s gold hunting lingo for you) to see them through.

But when the economy came back fossicking for gold fell to weekenders keen on an adventure.

Of course, all you’ve read so far is amateur stuff, hobbyist at best.

If you were to head out for gold nuggets this week you might want to do some research. Time spent studying a geology book could pay off.

More to that, one path to a gold strike is to find ancient rivers.

Water courses that could be several hundred million years old. 

These flows might be found hundreds or even thousands of feet above modern-day rivers.

Massive geologic uplift put them there along the steep reaches of mountainsides.

That’s your sign of a river. One that could have been gold-bearing a million or so years ago. 

To find these overlooked areas trek the mountains searching for telltale smooth stones, water-worn rocks.

Who knows what you could find.

But closer to home how about applying a bit of gold hunting resourcefulness to marketing and advertising.

That way you could find one thing that’s been overlooked in favor of technology.

The power of great creative work.

As to that, Bill Bernbach said ‘It may well be that creativity is the last legal unfair advantage we are allowed to take over the competition’.

That may be old school, but canny marketers know it as in-school when it comes to turning up riches.