How Decades of Product Launches Reveal the Role Imagination Plays in Success, and Why Businesses Can’t Afford to Ignore It
Tom Kalinske with (L to R) Alec Wright, Chief Innovation Officer at GSV Labs (Advisor), Tom, Jim Berkman (Advisor), Mike Choi (Product), and Dmitriy Pavlov (Founder/CEO).
Guest post by Tom Kalinske
When I reflect back on my career as a marketing and product executive, I feel fortunate for the number of successes that helped propel me to leadership roles – some expected, some based on intuition, and some that might have been completely missed had they not emerged through various kinds of market and consumer research.
One common theme was the ability of a product to fulfill some deep-rooted human desire; in other words, to tap into human imagination. I learned that understanding a consumer’s psyche can lead to incredible business success, which may seem counter-intuitive to the concept of business as a numbers game. To illustrate this point, I wanted to share a few stories from various stages of my career.
The Inception of Flintstones Vitamins (J. Walter Thompson)
I started my career in marketing at J. Walter Thompson in New York City after getting a Masters Degree in Business. There I was assigned to a group that was not a typical advertising role; a group tasked with developing new products for existing J Walter Thompson clients and introducing them into the marketplace.
I worked with clients like RJ Reynolds Foods (Chun King Egg Rolls, Jeno’s Pizza Rolls) and Miles Laboratories (One-a-Day vitamins, Alka Seltzer.) When Miles’ competitor Bristol Meyers introduced colored animal-shaped vitamins for kids, the RJR Chocks vitamins business went to hell, literally fell off a cliff. We did a bunch of research and learned that Flintstones characters were the leading characters at the time. But the folks at Miles Laboratories didn’t agree at first; they said the show had just gone off prime time and was moving to Sat AM. They asked J. Walter Thompson to do more research, which produced the same results.
So after successfully acquiring the Flintstones license from Hannah Barbara, we introduced Flintstones vitamins in 6 months, and it became the #1 selling vitamin within another 6 mos. This was a great introduction to product development and the power of market research and marketing.
Mattel & The Barbie Revival
When I was a product manager at Mattel, it was a hard time for Barbie. Co-founder Ruth Handler came to me and said the retail buyers and the analysts said it was over for Barbie. She said, “What do you think about that?” and I said, “That’s crazy. Barbie will be here long after you and I are gone.”
That’s what she wanted to hear, so she said she’d talk to my boss about making me the marketing & product Director on Barbie. I asked Ruth why she thought Barbie would be great again, and her answer was the key to Barbie’s revival: “With Barbie, a girl can be anything she wants to be.”
We tested the imagination play suggested by Ruth’s powerful statement in market research, and her line became the messaging and positioning we used for Barbie for the next 15 years. This led to introducing different Barbie versions, like Astronaut Barbie, Doctor Barbie, and Veterinarian Barbie.
While Ruth’s intuition was right-on and then validated by market research. There were occasions where market research revealed some positive aspect of the Barbie brand that we had completely missed. For example, there was a general feeling among well-educated moms that Barbie was too materialistic and just dressed in fancy clothes and drove around in her corvette. But market research told us that there was a powerful affinity among moms who had played with Barbie growing up, that they reflected positively on their experience and wanted their girls to experience it. In many ways, the new Barbie that allowed girls to be anything they wanted to be also gave the moms permission to satisfy a private emotional desire to share part of their own childhood with their daughters.
Over time, I became CEO of Mattel where we continued to invest heavily in R&D as part of our new product development process – approximately 7% of sales. I can only imagine what having a tool like Stitched Insights could have saved us in terms of time and money.
SEGA: Entering the Game
The same suspension of disbelief that helped Barbie’s revival was responsible for the enormous success of video games among teenage boys who actually felt they were entering the game. This was intuitive. But there was another reason for video game popularity we nearly missed.
We talked to a bunch of college kids in dorm rooms, conducted focus groups and sent out surveys, and a value message emerged. If I’m a college kid, I don’t have a lot of money and I might spend $10 to go to a 2-hour movie, but I could buy a $50 game and play it for hundreds of hours for literally pennies per hour of entertainment.
Because video games were considered relatively expensive as a “product” or game for the times, we missed what our customers knew: video games were cheap compared to other forms of entertainment.
Through my years of leadership at companies that invested heavily in market research, it has become clear that ratings and opinions alone are not sufficient to understand what makes customers tick: it can take deep, qualitative information to get to the bottom of what matters to them and will motivate them to purchase. For that, you need the context behind the review, and with the current speed of business, you need it quickly.
When I was CEO of Sega, we had a team of researchers who read and analyzed the reviews and letters at the back of gaming magazines. The results of the reviews eventually made their way to product revisions through the manufacturing process, because back then, we used ROM cartridges. Today, revisions to online games can be made in hours or days instead of weeks, so analyzing the wealth of digital data available quickly and efficiently is critical in terms of beating out the competition.
The Future of Brands
When I think about the overall importance of the qualitative information acquired through billions of dollars of investment over my years leading great companies like Mattel, Matchbox, Sega of America and Leapfrog, I realize what an incredible opportunity brand leaders have today to get the same kinds of insights much more rapidly with real-time deep-learning applied to live feedback of their and their competition’s customers.
If we had anything like Stitched Insights when I was in charge of strategic and tactical brand decisions, it would have allowed us to move dramatically faster and launch products that more dependably hit the bullseye on the first try. I’ve seen how Stitched Insights AI helps some of the world’s leading teams learn an awful lot, and puts the kind of meaningful insights I experienced at Mattel and Sega to work consistently and in a fraction of the time.
About Tom Kalinske:
Tom Kalinske is an iconic American executive of market-leading organizations, such as Mattel, Sega, LeapFrog, Matchbox, Gazillion Games, and Knowledge Universe. He currently serves on the advisory board of Stitched Insights where he is also an investor and partnerships liaison.
