Real Case Stories

In 1908, Sears issued its first specialty catalog for houses,  Book of Modern Homes and Building Plans , featuring 44 kit-house styles ranging in price from the US $360–$2,890. That's the equivalent of US $9,147-$73,431 today .  Cover of 1922 Sears Modern Homes catalog As Sears mail-order catalogs were in millions of homes, large numbers of potential homeowners were able to open a catalog, see different house designs, visualize their new home and then purchase it directly from Sears.  Sears reported that more than 70,000 of these homes were sold in North America between 1908 and 1940. In late 1918, Sears conducted a “race,” building two houses, a Sears Honor Built the pre-cut kit home and an identical house with no pre-cut lumber.  The pre-cut Honor Bilt Rodessa was the easy winner in this race, with 231 hours to spare (compared to the stick-built house).  Today, those two houses are still standing side by side as Sears struggles ...

Mail was the internet before the internet. The mail-order firms like Sears were able to penetrate underserved rural areas by leaning on the then-new infrastructures, such as the railroads that linked far-flung regions of the country.  One of the first mail-order launched in 1872, sixteen years before the famous Sears catalog , was Montgomery Ward.  Aaron Montgomery Ward  conceived of the idea of dry goods mail-order business in Chicago, Illinois, after he observed that rural customers often wanted "city" goods. The first catalog consisted of an 8 in × 12 in (20 cm × 30 cm) single-sheet price list, listing 163 items for sale with ordering instructions for which Ward had written the copy. By 1883, the company's catalog, which became popularly known as the "Wish Book", had grown to 240 pages and 10,000 items.  In 1888, Richard Wareen Sears started a business selling watches through mail order catalogs. The ...

The Bulova Corporation, formerly called Bulova Watch Company, is considered to be the pioneer of modern marketing techniques. Bulova Logo In 1926, when radio was a new phenomenon and not many understood the power of this new advertising medium, Bulova ran the first known radio commercial, "At the tone, it's 8 P.M., B-U-L-O-V-A, Bulova time". In the 1930s, 40s, Bulova were sponsors of all of the top twenty radio shows of the time. During this same period, Bulova became the first watch and clock manufacturer to start spending more than $1 million a year on advertising.  It wasn't a surprise, thus, when in 1941 television advertising became legal, Bulova produced the first-ever TV commercial. This 10-second commercial depicted a Bulova clock and the map of the United States with the live voice-over  "America runs on Bulova time." This ad cost Bulova all of $9 , which in today's money is $150 , and was watched by 4000 Americans. Apart...

Kevin Systrom worked in Google for 3 years before quitting and eventually co-founding Instagram which was acquired by Facebook for a billion dollars. In his book "How Google Works", Eric Schmidt writes about this incident. Salar Kamangar was very impressed with young Kevin who was a marketing associate and wanted to transfer him to the Elite APM program (Associate Product Manager). He was however rejected because the programme only accepted candidates with a computer science degree. Even though Kevin was a self-taught programmer and had a history of working with engineers he wasn't allowed into the programme. Read the book