A Product Launch - Pure Genius!

Picture this. A very famous lifestyle exhibition centre in Middle East vibrant with thousands of people every day. We strolled through the stalls of well-known brands pushing our shopping cart.

Mia, my nine-year-old darling little one, noticed a lot of people carrying similar large transparent bags containing probably a dozen or more of a certain brand of chips, unheard of in this part of the world. Curiosity climbed to its pinnacle as we kept meeting scores more carrying the same bag of chips. 

As we turned one of the corners among the exhibition stalls, we could see a name board carrying the same brand as of the mystery chips. There were two young men who stood on the pathway, in front of their allotted stall, each one assigned with a task. One of them, we felt was literally flying around with a sample packet of opened chips, politely offering to you to experience the taste first-hand. The offer had the charm of the prince from Cinderella and the persuasion of Don Corleone from The Godfather. It was an offer that you couldn't resist. 

As soon as you took the first bite, but before even you could form an opinion about the product, a big bag filled with more than a dozen packets of three different flavours of chips magically found its way to our trolley. This was placed tactically by the second young man who promptly mentioned it was only AED 10 or an equivalent of less than USD 4, a meagre sum compared to similar products in the market.

The conversion rate was an almost hundred percent for all the potential customers who walked through that alley. That's how solid the act of conviction was. Not just that, the complete act indeed was a performance worthy of a case study in B-schools! 

The product was probably mediocre, though opinions could be purely personal. Packaging was classy. Advertisement had novelty. Homework done well about target audience. Positioning was near perfect. Pricing was something short of a celestial phenomenon. 

Finally, with all this, a brand was born in a market, once penetrated, there was no look back at all. Peter Drucker, 'Father of Management', if alive, would have been more than happy to oblige a high-five! 

Well done boys!

PS: I’ve purposefully held back the brand name since I wanted this post to remain agnostic of any names.