How Esso Softsoap and AOL Once Tried to Beat Competitors

Judo in Action ' The meaning of judo -- an offshoot of jujutsu -- translates to something like "the gentle or yielding way" (judoinfo.com). The founder of judo was Professor Jigoro Kano, who believed that an alternative for jujutsu should be developed so that when practiced, a person practicing judo could win a contest "without injury" to the other combatant (judoinfo.com). This paper reviews and critiques the competition between product manufacturing companies -- combatants in their own right -- that compete with their innovative products and advertising campaigns.

Innovations in this paper's marketing stories are intended to help raise revenue without injury to a company's bottom line. Innovations and Competitions When Robert Taylor came up with Softsoap, a liquid that was designed to go head-to-head with bar soap, he knew full well that companies like Proctor & Gamble and Armour-Dial would compete with their own liquid soap products.

Taylor's gamble (to spend $7 million on advertising) paid off, but his timing (an important component of judo and other martial arts) was splendid when he decided to sell Softsoap to Colgate-Palmolive for $61 million. In the same year he sold Softsoap, Armour-Dial tried another produce (Liquid Dial) which roared past Softsoap with sales totaling $200 million.

Red Bull -- what wasn't known in 2003 The rumors surrounding Red Bull when it was first put on the market -- that it was made from bull's testicles or that it gave a fantastic high when mixed with vodka -- are actually pretty silly in hindsight. What is not silly is the fact that eleven years after this article appeared in the Harvard Business School publication, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported that the "high caffeine levels" in energy drinks can cause " ..

[heart] palpitations, hypertension, vomiting, convulsions," and can lead to death from heart failure (Siddique, 2014). And because Red Bull and other energy drinks are "targeted at young people," these drinks could have a very negative impact on public health (Siddique, p. 1). A University of Michigan study reported that energy drinks can lead to "cardiovascular symptoms, sleep impairment and nervousness and nausea" (Hodgekiss, 2014). In the "U.K.

Petrol Price War" section of the article it looks like greed -- or more formally, the "Pricewatch" program -- played a role in Esso losing £200 million in potential profits. This shows the downside of using every marketing trick in the book to get an edge on competitors in the petrol marketplace. To learn that people will drive farther to get a cheaper cost per gallon is also a lesson that pathological penny pinchers will have to learn the hard way.

So you drive 15 miles, or 25 miles to save several cents, maybe 15 cents on a gallon, but what did it cost you to drive that far for the savings? This section of the article has lessons for anyone open to learning. In the section "AOL vs. Freeserve" it takes a reader back to those days when Internet Service Providers (ISPs) were giving away browsers just to get people to log onto their platform (so they would be tempted to make purchases of advertisements on AOL and Netscape, et al.).

Research brings to the fore several companies that were giving away discs, just to get people to open an account. It also brings to mind how hard it was to log onto AOL when most people had "dial-up" and high-speed was not even a dot in the distance. Today, no one would have the patience to sit and watch AOL's little icon spin and spin for 10 minutes before the page opened up. One of the real lessons here is how far technology has come in the last 15 to 20 years.

Twenty years ago.