THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, February 7, 1997 TAG: 9702060158
SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON PAGE: 08 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: OVER EASY
SOURCE: Jo-Ann Clegg
LENGTH: 68 lines
Am I wrong here, or have the corporate giants of this country gone out of their collective minds? First Mattel let loose a bazillion dolls that couldn't tell the difference between a plastic french fry and a kid's hair. Then America Online changed its pricing and frantic computer owners from Caribou to Hilo found themselves in a 10,000 user pile-up at the on-ramp of the information super highway.
Let's take Mattel's situation first. Despite the fact that emergency rooms across the country reported treating tots with dolls firmly attached to their scalps, Mattel said, ``Hey, no problem.'' Or more specifically, they said that their engineers and people from the federal government's product safety division couldn't find one. If the company's failure to anticipate the problem ahead of time surprised me, their failure to admit it was downright mind-boggling.
It took Mattel nearly two weeks to recall their product and offer refunds on the kid-eating dolls that were already chewing their way through the nation's nurseries.
Meanwhile, America Online made a move that was equally breathtaking in its stupidity. Instead of charging its consumers a couple of bucks an hour to immerse themselves in whatever it was they wanted to get from the World Wide Web, it said ``Just pay us $20 a month and you can stay online as long as you want to.
Which is roughly the cyberspace equivalent of Candice Bergen replacing her dime-a-minute rate with a $60 a month fee that would let you yack away 20 hours a day if you were so inclined. Which, as it turned out in the AOL case, a lot of people were.
I do not pretend to be a communications genius, or even an electronics junkie, but the day I saw the new pricing offer on my screen, I figured there was no way it was going to work.
It strikes me that if a 60-year-old grandmother who doesn't know the difference between a megabyte and a hard drive could predict product disaster while sitting in front of a hopelessly outdated computer in Virginia Beach, how come the brains and the suits at AOL's corporate headquarters couldn't?
It also strikes me that what companies like Mattel and AOL need to do is run product ideas by real live consumers, preferably those with IQs somewhere between average and not too dumb, to see if what they've planned will work.
Let's take a look at the incredible, hair-gobbling Cabbage Patch snacker. It does not take a rocket scientist (or even a product safety engineer) to figure out what mothers have always known: if you want to find out if there's a wrong way a product can be used, give it to a kid to test.
Big brothers who enjoy terrorizing their little sisters (and who among them doesn't?) would have figured out the Cabbage Patch problem in about 30 seconds. I can just hear Bubba Jr. saying, ``Hey, Sis, now that we know your doll can eat fries, let's see what it does with your hair.''
With Sis's howls still echoing in their ears, Mattel could have sent the product back for reworking before the Toys 'R Us giraffe ever stuck his neck out to order a couple of million.
What AOL needed, on the other hand was a group of 60-year-old grandmothers (especially 60-year-old grandmothers who had been trained as school teachers), to test their product. In less than 5 minutes they would have asked the $64,000 question: ``Are you people out of your everlovin' minds?''
My peers would have followed that question with a decree that everyone from AOL's CEO on down should write the words ``Nobody will ever log off unless there's a financial reason for them to do so,'' 500 times.
That's write, as in pen and ink, on blue-lined paper in a notebook. None of this electronic type-it-in-once-and-make-499-copies stuff.
That taken care of, the AOL honchos could have gone back to product development and come up with a better plan. Like fire all their so-called product development specialists and replace them with real people.