I suppose the people who liked the samosas didn’t bother giving any positive feedback (apart from buying large quantities). Making business decisions based only on complaints from a minority of customers doesn’t make sense. Food for thought in the era of Facebook comments!

Via Springwise:
Taking a local approach to candy bars, Nestlé recently launched 19 new Kit Kat flavours in Japan that reflect food specialities of specific districts. Each flavour is sold exclusively in the region for which it was created, making the limited edition Kit Kats popular souvenirs for travellers.

The uniquely Japanese Kit Kat varieties include yubari melon and baked corn from Hokkaido island; strawberry cheesecake from Yokohama; cherries from Yamagata Prefecture; and sweet potato, blueberry and soybean from the Kanto region. Other varieties include wasabi, green tea, apple, green beans, chilli and miso. Tapping in to the Japanese tradition of sending students good luck wishes before their exams, Nestlé also launched a marketing campaign with Japan’s postal service to create “Kit Kat Mail,” a postcard-like product sold only at the post office.

Straightforward tactic! Find the biggest missing feature (eg “Plays Flash Video”) in the early innovation and announce the launch of a new product which has that feature, hoping that enough people will hold on to their money in expectation of the new product with the missing feature included.

Tesco said the system has already predicted temperature drops during July that led to a big increase in demand for soup and hot puddings.

The computer program includes detailed regional weather reports for the whole of the UK going back five years and, crucially, what each Tesco store sold as a result of that weather.

A rise of 10C, for example, led to a 300% uplift in sales of barbecue meat and a 50% increase in sales of lettuce.

(Via The Times and Cool News)

They are the agency that developed the recent Microsoft campaign and Bogusky’s explanation of their approach is  interesting:

When we started working on this we swung everyone in the agency over to PC’s, and really all of the senior people on the account are working on PCs, and we thought it was really important because we do a thing called method advertising, which is if you don’t use it, you don’t know how to talk about it. And I think in the past Microsoft’s creative had a lot of swirly magical kind of stuff going on, and it might have been because their agencies weren’t working on PCs. So once you start working on it and you understand you can do a better job on it, and I think we’ve done a really good job on it and, you know, one of the key factors is that we use them. I had never worked on a computer other than an Apple, and I thought, “Oh my god! Will I be able to do this?”

Watch the interview or read the entire transcript here.

Meanwhile, on the subject of creativity being a commodity, here’s a topical article on “Dumb Dads in Advertising”.

Time will tell if this approach pays off for Microsoft and HP, whose laptops seem to be the ones that are getting bought in these ads. But it’s certainly an interesting approach and timely given the recession.

This is quite simply amazing. It created buzz, activated the brand and ultimately sold the product.

Click here to see the story of the campaign.

Sheer marketing genius.  Read the entire “recession washing” report here.

According to The Economist,

(Hyundai) is now gaining market share more quickly than any other carmaker in America.  It has managed to increase its car sales in America—they rose by 14% in January compared with a year earlier.