Hall of Shame

Gee, your hair smells like yogurt

Not every new product can be a knockout, like light beer or TV dinners. Of the more than 5,000 items that annually appear on supermarket shelves, as many as 80% are commercial duds. Last week marketing specialists who attended the World New Products Conference in Toronto tried to learn some lessons from an exhibit of about 900 less-than-successful items.

Many failed efforts are simply misunderstood by consumers. When Heublein put its Wine and Dine dinners on sale in the mid-1970s (price: $1.35), buyers thought they were getting a macaroni dinner along with some wine to sip. The wine was actually a salty liquid intended for use in cooking the noodles. Trading on its success with infants, Gerber tried to market such grownup fare as beef burgundy and Mediterranean vegetables. The company's mistake was to put the food in containers that looked like baby-food jars. Gerber compounded its problem by labeling the product SINGLES. Later research showed that adults generally dislike being pegged as singles who eat alone, even if they do.

Other products have sunk for a variety of unexpected reasons. In 1980 Campbell received a tepid response to its new instant soup. The product was a single serving of highly concentrated soup to which the consumer added boiling water. As it happened, this was scarcely more instant than Campbell's regular soup, to which a consumer simply adds water or milk and then boils. General Foods stirred a short-lived sensation with Pop Rocks, a carbonated candy that crackled and popped when eaten. The candy was so effervescent that the company had to disprove rumors that children who swallowed the granules too fast would get a stomachful of carbonation. But the candy was nothing that youngsters could sink their teeth into, and the fad eventually lost its fizz.

A classic mistake was a shampoo test-marketed by Clairol called A Touch of Yogurt. As Robert McMath, chairman of Marketing Intelligence Service, a New York consulting group, points out, "People weren't interested in putting yogurt on their hair, despite the fact that it may be good for it. Maybe they should have called it A Touch of Glamour, with Yogurt." --