Personal Branding - The Companies Headhunters Blackball

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Why no consumer packaged goods company has been able to market a new product more successful than the least successful new product ever created by product development expert Calle & Company and Martin Calle remains a mystery. Baked Lays Potato Chips, created by Calle & Company for Frito-Lay sold $319 million in it's first ten months. That's roughly double 2008's most successful new product conceived and developed some other way, Gatorade's $159 million G2. Can't compare salty snacks to beverages you say? Only if you want to close your eyes and believe "you" are the "knower of all things." And that's the problem with personal branding. You build alters to yourself.

Not to promote but Calle & Company's product developments have topped the charts at IRI, NPD and ACNielsen now for 57 consecutive years. And why? Because outward-looking forward-thinking executives reach out to them while straight-forward, linear-thinking problem-solvers do not. For example, while Calle & Company was working with highly talented cross functional teams at Frito-Lay to determine what consumers wanted next, others at Frito-Lay were busy pushing "supplier" concepts like Wow! Chips with Procter & Gamble's Olestra championed by Pepsi CEO Indra Nooyi. And Wow! Chips with Olestra was barely able to fill the pipeline with $29 million worth of product.

So how do you NOT end up behind the 8 ball while making your company one that headhunters respect? And what's the difference between hitting a home run and striking out? That's a good question. Many acquaintances in the human resources industry tell me they attend conferences where the main topic of conversation is the fact that even though they hire the top talent, top talent fails to deliver growth. Visiting McKinsey & Company's website one also finds in McKinsey's assessment of the consumer packaged goods industry that, "despite solid balance sheets and healthy bottom lines executives still wonder where growth will come from. So apparently, McKinsey's consultants don't have the answers either. On the internet, especially at sites like LinkedIn, one can find a host of professional organizations dealing with marketing, marketing research, innovation, social media, social networking and branding. Yet in the market research groups, especially the "Next Generation Market Research" group one finds post after post and discussion after discussion addressing my grandfather's market research techniques. If this is indeed "The Next Generation" then why are they using my father's and grandfather's marketing research tools? There's nothing "next generation" about it.

So having covered those three aspects, consider the impact of working in these companies on your efforts to personally brand yourself. Afterall, this is, was, has been and will continue to be the era of "brand me."

On September 3, 2009 Business Week published The Companies Headhunters Avoid: Recruiters are in surprising agreement as to which companies they avoid when looking for executive talent. Companies such as The Coca-Cola Company figured prominently in the article and were I The Coca-Cola Company's Senior Vice President of Human Resources Cynthia P. McCaque I'd be concerned. The Coca-Cola Company has not launched a new product that ranked in IRI, NPD or ACNielsen's top ten annual pace setters for at least the last 25 years. The article details the inability of longtime Coca-Cola veterans to manage other companies effectively, including some of The Coca-Cola Company's prior luminaries.

According to the Business Week article, "The conclusion among headhunters is that the very attributes that make Coke a great company—an iconic brand and an unmatched global distribution system—also make it too easy for young managers to rise without having to develop the entrepreneurial skills necessary to compete in other arenas." "Granted, working at Coke can make you comfortable—the stock has yielded a 24.8% total return over the past five years, vs. a 2.4% return for the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index—but recruiters say it may not make you management material anywhere else."

But read the entire article at Business Week and remember two things. It's what you learn once you know it all that counts, and, stay humble, there's always someone better right behind you. Reach out!

Forget Focus Groups. B-52 of Qualitative Industry Set For Retirement

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Introducing Calle & Company's ASSAYS® - the Consumer Packaged Goods Industry's Premier Consumer Learning Experience.

As the consumer products industry decommissions its fleet of focus group facilities you will have to find an alternative source for quick, more creative and accurate consumer learning. Why is the focus group being decommissioned by the likes of Procter & Gamble? Because you can't get tomorrow's business results with yesterday's business practices. Success in today's innovation driven CMO thought leadership environment requires something far different and more agile.

After forty years of focus group immersion, business management experts couldn't agree more acknowledging focus groups are headed for the business boneyard. Because of their presence in leading consumer packaged goods companies, McKinsey, Bain, Boston Consulting, Booz Allen and Calle Company make a well-positioned assessment reporting that despite solid balance sheets and healthy profit margins in the US $2 trillion consumer packaged goods industry (the focus group's principal consumer) revenues are flat (a trend lasting decades) and executives are wondering where new growth will come from. So focus groups are no longer the consumer learning experience once revered during their 1970's heyday - but hey, that's when focus groups were new and marketers didn't know things.

What's wrong with focus groups? Plenty.

Focus Groups are based on yesterday's "question-based marketing" data acquisition and measurement approach - methodologies fraught with pitfalls and poor traditions. For starters,

1)To steal a line from attorney Atticus Finch in To Kill A Mockingbird, "You can't ask a question you don't already know the answer to" which is why so much research only reconfirms the things that you already know (boring and not creative) - resulting in your reinvention of other people's light bulbs and wheels.

2)Next, by default, whenever you ask a question, the answer comes AFTER something else has already happened. By default you will be a day late and a pound short - caught reacting to something that's already been done rather than being proactive and innovative.

3)You can't ask the right question. Because whenever you ask a question you don't get "the voice of the consumer" you get the voice of the inquirer through the question being asked, a form of bias that has always led marketers astray - pontificating to themselves, about themselves and wondering why their positioning, marketing, advertising or new product isn't more effective.

Calle & Company's ASSAYS® are innovative consumer learning circles not based on asking questions. ASSAYS provide your consumer groups with 10,000 incredibly comprehensive, highly creative, and consumer-appealing product-based thought-leadership selling solutions instead. Taking yourself and the yoke of your company's belief systems out of the loop - clean sheets of paper are the order of the day here. You become the blank slate on which consumers create, invent and indelibly etch their new impressions and perceptions - massive foresight enabling you to articulate what consumers really want before normal humans, a focus group moderator, or anyone else can articulate the need.

To learn more about ASSAYS ® Consumer-Creative ® Invention Circles contact Calle & Company at future@CalleCompany.com, or dial 714 244 9511.

CMO Strategy: The Death of Differentiation

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Want New Products That Get Noticed? Change the Process - by Barry Curewitz

Note to Barry Curewitz: It's easier to measure what is rather than create or measure what isn't. Companies can't "measure success into existance. That's why quant-jocks rule companies and creativity withers on the vine. The rise of qualitative creativity occured over the last 40 years. It's demise came around 1992. Since then it's been the dark ages for business creativity in CPG companies. Try calling 10 up and asking the receptionist to let you speak with, "the leader in charge of innovation driving the growth of the company." You will find that no one knows who that is.

Sitting on the outside looking in, articles such as this by Barry Curewitz of Whole Brain Brand Expansion, (follow link) repeat history. Knowing I personally participated in the development of more than 30 triple-digit topline growth new product and new category initiatives for companies such as Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, Coca-Cola, Frito-Lay and more during the 70s, 80s and 90s frustrates me greatly.

Witnessing the rise of the quant-jocks, linear thinkers and straight-forward problem solvers put the axe to creativity in business during the 90s and first half of this decade. Now even McKinsey admits that despite solid balance sheets, CPG revenues are flat and executives wonder where the growth will come from. So why execute a new study to reconfirm what we already know! There's knowone in the CMO suite that remembers or knows the thrill of insight that comes with the discoveries that escape straight-forward problem-solving.

Calle & Company grew by selling organic topline fuel to companies such as P&G, Coca-Cola and others for years. Even Doug Hall, of Eureka Ranch and American Inventor fame was our client for a number of years at P&G. But creativity died. Even Doug Hall has had to focus on the little fish. Big Companies don't want it. And why? Forget all the research. Old executives don't want new executives displacing them with better ideas.

As reported in this issue of Advertising Age P&G would rather sue KC over diaper ads rather than use the opportunity to turn lemons into lemonade. Companies that used to use brains now only use brawn. Why not flip the brick diaper ads? P&G should produce new ads, replacing the brick with a baby. Put construction sounds in the back ground and have a voice over say for Pampers, "Pardon our appearance. We're under construction." Come on guys. This stuff just isn't that hard.

There is an art to Dimensionalizing products and brands - to differentiate them with "product-based" selling solutions. And I wish to God someone in packaged goods would sit up and take notice.

Interpublic's Turnaround Effort Suffers Pair of Major Blows

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Give a stew assignment to an advertising agency and the agency will extoll stew's features and benefits a hundred different ways (calling them campaignable ideas and USPs - Unique Selling Propositions). Give Calle & Company a stew and you get The Soup You Eat With A Fork. Chunky Soup was stew - positioned as a soup - and that's the difference between agency creativity and Calle & Company's definition of a product's Special User Effects ®.
For 100 years, companies and products have focused attention on features and benefits, the lowest common denominator, turning today's brands into commodities, contributing to clutter and inefficient advertising. Abstract Dimensioning ®, Calle & Company's proven comprehensive, trademarked process for the definition of a product's Special User Effects ® defines far more effective and consumer-desired new product and product positioning directions. The company's proven Consumer-Creative ® methodology exhaustively exposes consumer minds to the existence of over 10,000 Product Potentials ® - instantly stretching minds to expand a product's audience, reach and appeal. This Multi-Dimensional Creativity ® is homework unavailable from market research departments, product design, marketing, or advertising agency gurus and leads to the instant consumer creation of new and highly consumer-desired directions.