Showing posts with label inventor. Show all posts
Showing posts with label inventor. Show all posts

Saturday, June 22, 2019

Sheer innovation is not enough



In 1912, Otto Frederick Rohwedder  an American inventor and engineer who created the first automatic bread-slicing machine for commercial use. It was first used by the Chillicothe Baking Company.What a great idea: a simple machine that could take a loaf  of bread and...slice it. The machine was a complete failure.

This was the beginning of the advertising age, and that meant that a good product with lousy marketing had very little chance of success. In 1927 Rohwedder successfully designed a machine that not only sliced the bread but wrapped it. In 1930 Continental Baking Company introduced Wonder Bread as a sliced bread.

It wasn’t until about twenty years later the first innovation first automatic bread-slicing machine – when a new brand called Wonder started marketing sliced bread – that the invention caught on. It was the packaging and the advertising (“builds strong bodies twelve ways”) that worked, not the sheer convenience and innovation of pre-slicing bread.

Something remarkable is worth talking about, worth noticing,exceptional, new. Interesting-  It’s a Purple Cow.

-Boring stuff is invisible. It’s a brown cow.

In the book “Purple Cow” the author Seth Godin talks about why you need to put a Purple Cow  into everything you build.

Source: “Purple Cow”  by Seth Godin  

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