28 SOME BINS AND SOME FRUIT

Within the marketing fraternity, certain brands seem to get a disproportionate amount of attention. In the 80s and 90s it was Virgin, but in the noughties it was innocent. The brand was founded by three friends, all Cambridge University graduates: Richard Reed, Adam Balon and Jon Wright. It’s strange to think that one of the most talked about and successful brands of the last decade nearly didn’t get started. In fact, the original partners weren’t completely convinced by their own market research and the decision to proceed came down to the lip of a coin. Richard Reed tells the story on www.inc.com:

“In February 1998 we were three 26-year-old friends living together and working in London, and we’d always wanted to set up a business together and we’d try to think up ideas. We were drinking too much beer and eating too much pizza and we thought we’d solve the riddle of healthy eating – everyone knows the benefits of it, but modern life conspires against it. So we thought totally natural fruit smoothies would be a great little healthy habit and would make it easy for people to do themselves some good.

“After about six months we had this orange, banana and pineapple recipe, and we needed to test it on people other than our friends and family, who of course all said it was good.

“So we bought £500 of fruit and set up a stall at the Jazz on the Green festival in Parsons Green, which we thought would be full of the type of people who’d buy our product. “Originally we had a three-page market research form for people to fill out, but when it’s a lovely sunny day you don’t want to fill out a form. And it felt too corporate. And so someone said: ‘Don’t you just want to know if people will buy them or not?’ So we had a sign that said: ‘Do you think we should give up our jobs to make these smoothies?’ and we had a ‘yes’ bin and a ‘no’ bin, and we committed to each other that if the yes bin was full we’d quit our jobs the next day.

“And the yes bin was full, but still we weren’t sure. So we went back to our house in Barons Court and flipped a coin, and it came up three times in a row tails.

“So we all went in Monday morning and resigned.”

And the rest, as they say, is history.

And the moral is that market research doesn’t need complicated methodologies to be useful. Could you simplify or reduce the amount of research you do and still get the information you truly need?