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[OM] Re: New Olympus Releases

Subject: [OM] Re: New Olympus Releases
From: Moose <olymoose@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2007 03:25:21 -0800
Jan Steinman wrote:
>> From: Moose <olymoose@xxxxxxxxx>
>>     
>> Perhaps, but they may be following a well known marketing rule.
>>
>> Many moons ago, some merchandiser in one of our divisions decided  
>> to get
>> smart. He looked at sales of the leading hair color. there were
>> something like 15 shades, but 3 or 4 of them accounted for 80% of  
>> sales
>> and 6 accounted for over 90% of sales. So he logically cut back to 6
>> shades. Sales plummeted for each shade and for the product as a whole.
>>     
>
> AKA "shelf space," AKA "weed philosophy."
>
> If you pump out lots of products with slight differences, you can  
> often get more shelf space, and crowd out your competitors. Sorta  
> like Coke, Coke lite, Coke Classic, Diet Coke, Cherry Coke, etc.
>   
In this case, though, that was not the issue. A purely pragmatic test, 
and unintentional at that. I think he really believed he could sell 90+% 
of what was moving before with many fewer SKUs to stock.

I know you have conspiracy ideas about all large companies, and I'm not 
saying you are all wrong, mostly only in attributing more intelligence 
and knowledge to them than I would. And I do understand the shelf space 
business. Big retailers recognize it too, and charge slotting fees.

However, I believe this was a pure case of consumer decision behavior 
effects. I spent over 30 years in the mass market retail business, seven 
of them directly managing a market research department and many others 
working in one way or another with market and marketing research. I know 
a little about this stuff.

Moose

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