Wallace, Gromit & an Engineer?

Tea has never been the most exciting of products. In fact, the most exhilarating
thing to have happened in the tea industry in the last hundred years was the
invention of the tea bag - that universal, ubiquitous repository for the stuff
that finally put an end to that revolting experience of finding leaves on the
end of the tongue. Nevertheless, even the creation of the tea bag could hardly
be called a revolution.

And sadly, consumption of tea has been declining too. It has been eschewed by
the great British Public, of all people, by that other noteworthy beverage -
coffee. They have, it would seem, been enchanted by the smells of the Ethiopian
Sidamo, Sumatra and Gold Coast blend wafting its way out of one or more of those
US transplants along the local high street.

So what to do if you are unfortunate enough to be a tea manufacturer? Is this
the end of the great British cuppa? Not at all. Not if you are as clever as the
marketing folks at PG tips, that is. They didn't just sit and cry in their beer
and watch their market slowly evaporate, did they? Not at all.

By enrolling the help of the Nick Park's distinguished creations Wallace and
Gromit, this noteworthy division of Unilever shipped an incredible two and one
half thousand million tea bags in the space of one month.

That's right! By inserting a limited edition ( is 1.5 million a limited
edition?) Mug with the likeness of Gromit the Dog into its 160 pack boxes, the
tea flew off the shelves like hot cakes. And put tea back on the map for good.

Since the launch of this highly successful marketing campaign, the Gromit Mug
has been a sought after item world-wide, with collectors in Oregon even paying
over $25 dollars to one underpaid editor who bought entire consignments of the
things from Sainsbury's. (No names, please! - Eddie.).

So what does the success of the Wallace and Gromit characters in the tea
business have to do with an engineer's industry? Quite a lot, actually.

You see, like tea, many industrial products - such as bearings, pumps, memory
devices, air conditioning systems, computers and sometimes, some software
offerings - have also become commodity items. And they've also recently come
under fierce price pressure from far eastern manufacturers in China, Korea and
Taiwan. The makers of such products are clearly in the same hot water 'space' as
the people in the beverage business were.

But taking a leaf out of PG Tips' books, here's their chance to differentiate
their products. And make some money too. All they need to do is to put the same
sort of magic back into their products - to personalise them, to mass customise
them, to create an air of value if you will - in much in the same way as the
folks at PG tips did.

Now I'm not suggesting that a licensing deal with Nick Parks, the gifted creator
of the Wallace and Gromit, is the answer to everyone's problems. But thinking
along the same lines as the marketing folks as PG Tips possibly couldn't do any
harm.