Robert McMath – ib tug neeg ua hauj lwm kev lag luam – npaj los tsim ib lub tsev qiv ntawv siv cov khoom siv rau cov neeg siv khoom.

The course of action was

Starting in the 1960s he started to purchase and preserve a sample of every new item he could find. The collection soon outgrew his office and he moved it into a converted granary, where it continued to grow rapidly.

The results

What McMath did not take into account was that most products fail – so that his collection was overwhelmingly made up of products that did not survive the test of the marketplace.

The lesson learned

The insight that ‘most products fail’ proved to be the making of McMath’s career. The collection itself – now owned and operated by GfK Custom Research North America – is now regularly visited by consumer product manufacturing executives eager to avoid mistakes they or their competitors have made in the past.

Source: The Guardian, 16 Lub Rau Hli Ntuj 2012

CIA IB SAIB