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Clever Marketing With Dicey Product = Failure

And here's a cautionary tale from Thomas Heath, who writes about Kelly Harman, a Manassas, Va.-based owner of a successful marketing firm called Zephyr Strategy. Harman made the rookie mistake of thinking she could build a brand before she had a consistently great product.

Bearing the catchy name of "Spoonful of Sin," her idea was to deliver a specially made dessert to a subscriber's office for $24.95 a month. Harman enlisted various pastry chefs in the D.C. area to produce a "Sin of the Month" with the corporate gift market in mind. Suffice to say that there were quality control and distribution problems, coupled with the usual cost overruns (a lot of which had to do with advertising, marketing and promotion).

"I knew and felt like I could build a brand, not a huge empire, but something that was attractive for acquisition by somebody else," Harman says in an instructive post-mortem. "That was the wrong way to go about it." Her Web site is still up, however, and Heath reports that Harman wants to slap the tantalizing brand name on another product. How about a book?

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