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 ...

Brands are potent, valuable and rare. Successful brands drive consumer loyalty, creating long-term economic benefits and confirming with the definition of an asset. However, as late as the 1980s accountancy was unable to accommodate these assets.  In 1984 News Group, the Australian flagship company of Rupert Murdoch's worldwide publishing empire  decided to take pre-emptive action to correct this accounting anomaly and included a valuation  for ‘publishing titles’ in its balance sheet.  News Corporation did this because, being an acquisitive company, it had to find a way adjust its acquired "goodwill". Following the accounting standards of the day - deduct acquired goodwill from shareholder equity - would have ravaged the corporation's balance sheet. Thus, News Group reduced the acquired goodwill by treating the brands as acquired assets.  Following the lead of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, the British Bakeries and foods comp...

As of 2015, Costco was the  second largest retailer in the world  after  Walmart  and its stock had soared more than 5,000 percent since going public in the mid-1980s. However, this store doesn't install signs in its aisles. It rather lets it's customers wander in the store, looking for the things they intend to buy while browsing through stuff that they "notice" on the way.  Poor customer experience, right? Wrong! Costco, in fact, has mastered the psychology behind shopping.  Costco constantly changes the location of its top-selling products - such as light bulbs, detergent, and paper towels - forcing the customers to search storewide. And as logic dictates, t he more time consumers spend ambling around the store,  the more likely  they are to spend. Costco rotates upward of 25% of its hard-goods and its products. The result is that, of the 3,600 items for sale, a full 1,000 may be offered only for that particular moment ...

Founded in 1851, Corning Inc. is one of the world's biggest glassmakers today. It boasts of annual sales of nearly $10 billion and billions in annual profits. Developer and manufacturer of the now ubiquitous Gorilla Glass , Corning is another sterling example of a "superstar" firm. Corning has had a rich history of working with innovators from Thomas Edison to Steve Jobs. In fact, innovation is one of the key values driving Corning's business strategy. Corning regularly invests a healthy 10 percent of its revenue in R&D ; to maintain and further it's technological leadership. And that's in good times  and  in bad. When the telecom bubble burst in 2000 and cratering fiber-optic prices sent Corning's stock from $100 to $1.50 per share by 2002, its CEO at the time reassured scientists that not only was Corning still about research but that R&D would be the path back to prosperity. Corning has continuously reinvented itself – moving fro...

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 ...

Content marketing began long before the internet.  Radio was an early adopter of content marketing. And one of the most prominent examples of this type of advertising is the  soap opera . In fact, content marketing led to the creation of the monicker "soap" opera.  In the golden age of radio, advertisers sponsored entire programs, usually with some sort of message like "We thank our sponsors for making this program possible", airing at the beginning or end of a program. One of the most successful examples of such advertising is  Oxydol's Own Ma Perkins - In 1933,  P&G chose it's brand Oxydol to sponsor its first radio serial, Ma Perkins .   The fifteen minute show ran five days a week and mentioned Oxydol's name twenty to twenty-five times during each episode. P&G received 5,000 letters complaining about Ma Perkins within the first week. But by the end of the first year, sales had doubled. In fact, t his commitment is regard...

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...

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...

Over 100 years after Theodore Roosevelt warned against the growing control of a handful of corporate giants, a small group of "superstar" companies—some old, some new—are once again dominating the global economy. As per a 2015 Mckinsey Global Institute report , 10% of the world’s public companies generate 80% of all profits. What's most intriguing is that the gap between these few “superstar” firms and the rest is growing .  But what makes these "superstars" thrive? These firms are known to invest in their core skills so as to relentlessly pursue their long-term goals. And thus it turns out, that a remarkable number of superstar companies are family owned or run by dominant owners who can resist the pressure for short-term results. The last single-arch McDonald's sign in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, modified to mention the drive-thru, dismantled in 2016 For an example, we can turn to McDonald’s. In 1948, the fast-food joint was already a succes...

Barbie, the teenage fashion model, was created by Ruth Handler , the co-founder of the toy manufacturing company Mattel Inc. It was inspired by a German fashion doll, Bild Lilli ; a doll based on a character  known as "a symbol of sex and pornography for the men of Germany". First edition of brunette  Barbie  doll in zebra striped swim suit from 1959 Barbie debuted on 9th March 1959 at the American International Toy Fair and was a "crashing bomb," according to the New York Times. Sears, then a retail giant with the power to make or break a toy, refused to stock Barbie.  A then-unprecedented $12,000 market-research test also found mothers hating the doll, even though girls loved her.  But Barbie proved everyone wrong.  In the first year of its launch girls snapped up 351,000 Barbie dolls at $3 apiece, making the doll a smash hit.  The unmatched success of Barbie is attributed to it's unique and innovative market...