Does Your Product Rotate?
I love finding the marketing meaning in something as simple as; sales changes if deserts rotate or not. Nathan Detroit bet on the type of deserts that where eaten in the musical Guys and Dolls. This particular Nathan is Nathan Dintenfass of The Venture Geek Blog who wrote about this in his March post. There is a fascination with deserts in just about all cultures… what can you add to your product and service that is the sweetener, the desert, to close the deal?
I think what this post also speaks to (beyond focusing on the details as Nathan lays out) is; what is the marketing opportunity. Where in your business is the “non-rotating desert” and how can you rotate it so more is visible to more of your customers? How can you display your products and services in the most appealing way (i.e. benefit statements; how you can change their lives) directed to the most number of relevant customers.
Thanks Nathan for getting us to consider things more carefully with this elegant analogy.
March 31st, 2007 by Nathan Dintenfass - The Venture Geek Blog
I enjoy listening to This American Life. I don’t often get to it on a Saturday afternoon (when it’s on my local public radio station), but today I happened to catch it. It was all about the people who come in and out of a diner called The Golden Apple in Chicago over a 24-hour period. But, that’s not what this post is about.
No, this post is about rotating desserts. You see, on the day the This American Life crew was in the Golden Apple the dessert case that would normally be spinning desserts around and around was broken. You know, the kind of thing that looks like this:
So, yeah, it was broken — the desserts weren’t spinning. When the desserts weren’t spinning the Golden Apple sold 50% fewer desserts. Think about that for a moment. Take stationary desserts and start them rotating slowly and double your sales.
Why do I care about desserts, rotating or otherwise?
Because this is such a great lesson in why details matter. They matter in retail environments, and they matter in software — and from now on I think I will always think of that as “The Rotating Dessert Issue”. When I used to build custom web applications for a living we were constantly faced with clients looking at the “buy vs. build” decision. One of our strongest pitches was that off-the-shelf systems may get most of it right, but it’s the details that really end up mattering. Now, of course we had a vested interest in taking that stance, and there are plenty of good arguments against building custom software in many situations, but it doesn’t change the fact that details matter.
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