Real Case Stories

M&M's are part of the main operational food ration for the US Armed Forces. The candies have been part of NASA's every space shuttle mission since Columbia 1981 and are also on the International Space Station menu. Do you know why? Because the candy "melts in your mouth--not in your hand!"  In 1932, confectioner Forrest Mars Sr. moved to England and began manufacturing the Mars bar for troops in the United Kingdom. He  was looking to solve a key consumer problem of the time before air-conditioning: chocolate bars melted in the heat, so Americans stopped buying them.  During the Spanish Civil War , he  saw soldiers eating the British made  Smarties , a color-varied sugar-coated   chocolate   confect ionery , as part of their rations. Mars was thrilled by the unique construct of these candies and knew it to be the perfect solution to the sales slump that hit the family business every summer.  He returned to the Un...

When we look at a scene, our eyes move around quickly, 70 to 100 times a second , locating anything noteworthy.  This visual input is translated into a mental memory map by our brains. These quick eye movements are called saccades .  Saccadic movement is what causes Change Blindness :  a perceptual phenomenon that occurs when humans  fail to detect seemingly obvious changes to scenes around them .  Example of images that can be used in a change blindness task As a result when we see we unconsciously focus on areas that our evolutionary biases deem important (often anything moving fast , anything that looks like a living thing that may be a potential friend or foe). The brain automatically fills in the rest of the details from its memory map — often disregarding details that it thinks it has seen before.  "The Door Study" a 1998 study by Daniel Simons and Daniel Levin is the one of the most popular study to demonstrate how change b...

Ray Kroc in the 1940s owned a successful Milkshake mixer distribution business. In the beginning of 1950s his business started to slow down. In the US there was an exodus from the cities to the suburbs and many neighborhood soda fountains were forced to close down. But one small restaurant in San Bernadino kept ordering more machines. He flew down and met the McDonald brothers who ran the restaurant. When Ray Kroc joined the McDonald brothers, he envisaged thousands of Mc Donalds outlets across the country. In trying to identify the best locations, he used to fly over towns looking for church steeples. He believed that good American families would live around churches and that's the kind of customers he was looking for. src Consumer Behavior by Schiffman/Kumar

The industry average in the clothing industry to take a design to distribution is around 9 months. Zara, through efficient use of technology, has developed a distribution model that takes new models from design to the store in just 3 weeks . As a result, the company produces approximately 20,000 designs a year! To make this work, Zara uses  technology to make sure departments and outlets the world over constantly know what is needed when and where.  Designers keep in daily contact with store managers, discussing which items are most in demand and which aren't.  This, supported by real-time sales data, allows the designers to action repeat orders and create fresh designs, and from La Coruna they are shipped directly to the stores, eliminating the need for expensive warehouses. Some of the unique features Zara's business model is: It employs 100s of designers at its HQ in Spain Half its production facilities are close to its HQ in Spain, Portugal and Morocco - ...