HP and Accordions
November 10, 2014
I try to avoid reading about marketing and MBAs. Sometimes I slip. For example, this morning I read about the trials and tribulations of “Pizza Hut Reboot: Food Chain To Reinvent Itself For The First Time.”
The write up explains that selling pizza is not easy—when you are part of YUM. Here’s a passage that I found laughable:
They plan to change everything from their topping options to the very logo. One major change includes the addition of 10 more crust flavor toppings. While garlic has always been the general standby, apparently you will now have more options than just removing the garlic if you want to. There will be new toppings as well, including salami and spinach, and more sauces available for the pie itself, such as barbecue and balsamic.
This sounds like the silliness search and content processing vendors foist on the wary prospects. Hey, the problem with pizza from Pizza Hut may be that the company is out of step with pizza eaters. There is a joint in Middletown, Kentucky that offers all you can eat pizza at lunch time for less than $8. That pulls in the hungry pizza cravers.
Almost as intriguing as a Fortune 100 company trying to get hip with pizza is the information in the article “What Do Chief Executives and Accordion Players Have in Common.”
This AdAge.com story includes this passage:
Expand and Contract. Repeat. Except When CEOs Hit a Sour Note, They Blame the Marketing
I like this analogy. The write up is about Hewlett Packard. One passage I highlighted before my trust Ricoh laser ran out of toner was:
“The question I get most often is, ‘What is H-P?'” said Meg Whitman recently and then added “It’s a communication problem.” Sure, blame the marketing people for not solving the company’s communication problem instead of blaming the management people for inflating the company into such a mess it can’t be communicated.
I don’t think marketing can do much to improve the four percent after tax net profit margin.
Perhaps Autonomy Systems as a Service (quite an acronym!) will generate an IBM Watson scale $10 billion payoff. These seems as likely as Pizza Hut crushing the upstarts like Hometown pizza or neutralizing the Peyton Manning love of Papa John’s pizza.
Stephen E Arnold, November 10, 2014
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