Business: THE GREAT RUSH FOR NEW PRODUCTS

The two most powerful words you can use in a headline are FREE and NEW. You can seldom use FREE, but you can always use NEW—// you try hard enough.

—David Ogilvy,

Confessions of an Advertising Man

THE whoosh, pop and grind of thousands of fanciful contraptions echoed through Manhattan’s cavernous Coliseum. The occasion was “Patexpo ’69,” a show designed to match up 300 inventors of new products with the men who can market them. As the visitors saw, modern man’s ingenuity has lately produced a gun that fires a net to enmesh would-be muggers, skis with wheels for schussing on dry land, a timer that rations children’s television viewing, tongs that carry melons without bruising them, and a keyless electronic lock that opens when hidden pressure points are pushed. There is even an ingenious array of glass tubes that waters indoor plants while a householder is away: Such an exhibit would have stirred little interest among major companies a few years ago, but this display attracted representatives of some of the nation’s largest firms; they could not afford to stay away.

U.S. business today is rushing to develop more products with a shorter shelf life to satisfy the apparently insatiable and increasingly fickle consumer. Last year more than 9,500 new items were introduced in the consumer package-goods field alone, the area of greatest product turnover. Less than 20% met their sales goals; the cost of new-product failure to U.S. business is estimated to be well over $2 billion annually. Some highly promoted disappointments in recent years: Gablinger’s Beer, Hunt’s Flavored Catsups, Fact Toothpaste, Noxzema Medicated Cold Cream and Easy-Off Household Cleaner.

Crap Game. Undaunted, companies go right on turning out new products. Last week Honeywell introduced a $10,600 “kitchen computer” programmed to help the U.S. housewife plan her meals and balance her checkbook. Though Honeywell might sell some to millionaires who have everything, the product could be the precursor of much cheaper small computers for the home; other companies are already working on the idea. Singer recently announced that its Friden office-equipment division will bring out at least one new product a month for the next year. “Developing new products is like a gigantic crap game,” says Boone Gross, former president of the Gillette Co. “The cost of failure—either by not getting into the game or by launching unsuccessful products—is astronomical. Yet the profits to be earned from successful new products are almost with limits.”

Why is there such a voracious demand for new products? The growth of affluence, travel, education and technology, plus saturation television advertising, have contributed to greater consumption. Items to exploit the anti-Establishment values of the youth market—mod clothes, poster art—and the comfort-seeking wants of the increasing number of old people added further to the product crush. As new products proliferate, consumer confusion intensifies and brand loyalty erodes, leading to the creation of still more new items.

On this shifting scene, a bold new entrepreneur has appeared: the new-product specialist, the privateer who will find or develop a product for any company willing to pay. These specialists contend that most U.S. corporate managers, for all their talk about market research, still think more in terms of product than consumer. The privateers are usually young veterans of advertising or marketing who work on ideas supplied by clients or develop and sell products on their own. More than 20 independent new-product firms are at work on projects for General Foods, National Biscuit, Johnson & Johnson, Bristol-Myers, Continental Can and other companies.

Instant Elephant. Roger Shashoua, 29, has founded the International Inventors Association, a clearinghouse that he claims has 156,000 members. Through it, Shashoua finds and promotes the ideas of inventors, tinkerers or a few slightly mad scientists. He either brings the products to client companies, which pay his Patents International Affiliates $125 a year to get listings of inventions for sale, or markets them himself through a subsidiary. Among the products that his firm is considering putting on the market: a sanitary napkin that dissolves in water and a camera that shoots 360° photographs. Ted Angelus, formerly of BBDO, has started New Products Action Team, Inc., and is searching for a buyer for his Instant Elephant breakfast-food kernels, which pop into animal shapes when milk is added. Foster D. Snell, Inc., which is under contract to several large food firms, is developing meatless ham made of vegetable protein, cholesterol-free eggs, and orange juice without citric acid. The firm also concocts scents for leather products and other goods. “The biggest lure after sight is smell,” says Vice President Kurt S. Konigsbacher.

Most so-called new products are merely minor variations of existing items. “A truly new product can be a big gamble,” says Konigsbacher. “It would probably fail unless the company bringing it out was willing to spend heavily to educate the public.” Test-marketing of a single product can cost up to $1,000,000. To cut the bill, many firms are putting heavier emphasis on refining products before the store trial; they increasingly use small panels of consumers who judge products in each stage of development, from conception to completion.

Brand Collision. Finding names for all the products is becoming a major preoccupation. More than 370,000 trademarks are registered with the U.S. Patent Office, and the number is growing by 20,000 a year. Having all but exhausted the dictionary, marketers are increasingly turning to the computer to produce suitably short, evocative non-words. A typical computer printout (see above) reads: EMBO, EMBU, EMCA, EMCE—and so on and on.

At Du Pont, finding one name can tie up the talents of a team of marketers, lawyers, advertising men and psychologists. They comb the computer lists, eliminating those words that are difficult to pronounce, look bad in print or are too similar to existing trademarks. The leftovers are tested for general appeal and memorability. With so many names floating about, no marketing man can be sure of avoiding a conflict. General Foods recently started test-marketing a snack product called Pringle’s Pop Chips only to discover that Procter & Gamble was simultaneously testing Pringle’s Newfangled Potato Chips. Even greater risks lurk in the slang of foreign languages. A leather-preservatives manufacturer tried to market a product called Dreck—until he discovered that the name means dirt (or worse) in German and Yiddish.

Will the tide of new products ever ebb? No, says Edward H. Meyer, president of Grey Advertising. “The products will continue to come; there’s no end to that at all.” That view is questioned by Wayne Jervis, formerly In-terpublic’s new-product chief, who now heads his own product-development agency. “We are going through a phase when there are too many new products —some perhaps that are not meeting real needs,” he says. Considering the crushing rate of new-product failure, that is indeed an understatement.