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Yesterday, I was walking with my little brother at the beverage area of our local mart. We were looking for drinks to gulp down on our way home. There were hundreds of different colas. You know, those piles of drinks in a long open fridge.
Then I saw this weird looking, 1980’s style orange drink that says “With real pulp inside”.
Suddenly, something popped out of my head.
I remembered this little story (urban legend?) that used to haunt a local orange drink here in our country.
They have this promise that their drink has real orange ingredients in it. But during the bottling process, one of their machines broke and spilled the dried pulp over the orange drink.
In spite of that, the bottling went ahead. The drink was sent and sold to almost all stores nationwide.
Big deal? YES, first of all they don’t serve that kind of drink and second, there wasn’t any drink that has real pulp before.
People may not like it. So what they did was they bleached out a commercial and advertised their “new, with pulp bits inside” and guess what? sales skyrocketed!
That maybe an urban legend folks but hey, we’ve learned something.
What looks like a problem can be turned into a benefit. You can make something unique out of it.
Of course, if something is really bad – like the drink could make people bald or make them sick, this type of marketing can’t help you with that.
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18 Comments →
HAHA! An error turned success :)
-Mike
I think you should read my post about Yahoo! Buzz overtaking Digg. I know that you have been banned from Digg. :-P Maybe this is a payback time.
Hi Carl,
Sometimes success happened accidentally. Great post Carl!
Thanks!’
Albert Hallado
why were you banned from digg?
carl i think that you should do an article about the best affiliate program to use of someones website. i know adsense is popular, but for 1000 clicks, i got about a dollar from adsense, but for 500 clicks, i have 20$ from adbrite. granted you cannot pick your ads, but i think that you should do a little something on that subject… just a thought, because many people are interested! :)
nice site, btw how many visits per day do you get?
yup, sound interesting..
i can’t believe adbrite is actually paying you more than adsense.
would love to pick your mind about that.
Urban Legend.
Honestly, orange juice naturally has pulp in it. Theres no way there was a mistake and pulp was dumped into the whole batch :D . Dorry, just wayyy too unlikely, interesting read tho ;)
Awesome post, smart and funny! You know I’ll do some post about you and your blog yet in smart and positive way.
~LC
The USP of many products could just be really small, like in this case, Pulp.
It’s the companies that try to be a little creative end up leading the market too. The other issue is how to maintain the market with your new found “ingredient”
Rgds Fione
http://www.eOneNet.com
That is similar to the story of the first floating white soap which became a popular brand in the world today. What I mean is there are other unintended moves, often labeled as “mistakes,” especially in the business world which ends up right. The history of discoveries similar to this actually reminds us to allow fate direct our finger a bit. Let events come naturally. Who knows something successful in our online or offline life might ensue.
Anything can happened in the world of business and finance.
Hi Carl,
I think you are on a lenten vacation, hope you checked this URL below. It says you are on top of the youngest bloggers in the world. I do not know what are other criteria aside from age but Congratulations! You deserve it.
http://www.retireat21.com/blog/top-30-young-bloggers-under-21/
Hi Carl, just check this out!
http://www.retireat21.com/blog/top-30-young-bloggers-under-21/
Congratulations!
I hope this mistakenly placed comment is benificial to you afterly.
Any follow up on the reports of Baldness?? :)
Hi Carl,
I have a website that talks about my blogging mistakes. You can make money from them by not repeating what I did.
Thanks for the good post.
It is true tho, many times mistakes turn out into real success.
Hey Carl,
very useful post! In fact, i’ve tried lots of ways to make money online with these so called “marketing gurus”, but didn’t have success… these days i finally found something that really works. A guy named David Parnell has developed a nice automated system that makes money with little effort by our part. Its awesome! If someone wanna take a look, just click here.
Keep up the good work!
Hi Carl,
This is one of the best ways to find ‘hidden successes’. In my own work some of my most successful projects were ones where I didn’t even expect results. I was showing my daughter how to use Blogger for some fun, simple earnings and it turned into huge results. Live and learn!
I just wanted to say thank you.
I was discouraged today because my Google Adsense earnings (along with other blogging income) was less than it used to be — a lot less lately.
Then I just Googled “make money online” to see who took the spot away from John Chow.
I remember you from before, but I just took the time to go thru and do some things to improve my rankings and traffic, and therefore income too — stuff I’d been neglecting like sitemaps, robots.txt files and stuff I didn’t know, like the redirect plugin trick.
Imagine — a 14-year-old boy teaching a 38-year-old woman how to feel better!
God bless!