Terrible timing: when you're rolling along on the Convenience Trend Wagon, watch out for potholes

American Demographics, Jan, 1998 by Robert M. McMath

When you're rolling along on the Convenience Trend Wagon, watch out for potholes.

There used to be more time to develop and introduce products. But as competition has heated up, timing has become more critical. When the Trend Wagon is rolling, you have to catch it before it passes by. The New Products Showcase is food with products that tried to catch the wagon as it pulled away from the stop.

Campbell's Souper Combo is a good case in point. It was a combination frozen soup and sandwich. It was intended for people with microwaves at the office, or for kids on their own at home. Super convenient, thought the Campbell people.

The product apparently did well in tests. Campbell rolled it out nationally, whereupon it flopped. The company reportedly spent $10 million in marketing support during its last 12 months. In spite of that, sales kept talking. People tried it out of curiosity, but they didn't come back for more. Why?

We are constantly being berated to recycle, use less packaging, and withhold our dollars from environmentally unfriendly products. Some versions of Souper Combo had as many as 11 pieces of packaging. At the time of its release, the magazine Garbage awarded the line its "Worst Product of the Month" award. Because the magazine was new and had an unusual name, it got a lot of national attention, and so did Souper Combo's unwanted "award." The timing might have been dumb luck, but it should not have taken a magazine editor to realize that 11 pieces of packaging were excessive.

Excess packaging wasn't the product's only flaw. It was convenient to prepare and eat, but it wasn't necessarily convenient to transport. Even a neatly self-contained frozen meal can't sit in a briefcase or other carrier for many hours without beginning to defrost. This flaw needn't have been fatal, though. After all, many offices with microwaves also have freezers, as well as well-established protocols about lunchroom etiquette (i.e., don't eat other people's food). So the potential storage problem didn't do in the product, either.

Taste may have played a role. Fresh sandwiches taste better than nuked ones. There's also the possibility that some were put off by the idea of frozen soup. Even latchkey children turned out to be an inappropriate target--not because they couldn't prepare the products, but because they'd undoubtedly choose to microwave something other than a nutritious soup-and-sandwich meal if left to their own devices.

In the final analysis, it's possible that the product's biggest flaw was also its key benefit. Campbell thought it was giving consumers a product that would save time. But it tried to improve on what was already a pretty convenient meal. Consumers can heat up a bowl of canned soup and make a sandwich just about as easily as they could prepare Souper Combos. Timing is everything, so they say. In this case, it seems to have been off.

Robert M. McMath is director of The New Products Showcase & Learning Center in Ithaca, New York, a collection of more than 60,000 once-new consumer products, most of which are no longer sold.