"One of the most original
marketing books in
decades."
Simon Chadwick
Partner,
Cambiar LLC
Purchase:
© 2007. Moskowitz and Gofman. All rights reserved.
Media about the book, RDE and the authors
Selling Blue Elephants
By Howard Moskowitz and Alex Gofman
Moskowitz Jacobs Inc.
Intellectually rigorous, hugely entertaining, always thought-provoking: this is one great book.
Roger Tredre,
Editor-In-Chief,
Worth Global Style Network, London
The bank needed help identifying target markets, messages, and communication strategies. Market
research firm Moskowitz Jacobs Inc., White Plains, N.Y., recommended an optimization process and
technology called IdeaMap to identify two attitudinal segments and linked them to the bank's mailing
database. The first month, the bank acquired 65% of annual predictions for new card applications; the
second month, 85%. Overall, the bank and credit card issuer achieved 250% of their annual goal
within the first year. [Read more here...]
Moskowitz is a man of uncommon exuberance and persuasiveness: if he had been your freshman
statistics professor, you would today be a statistician. [Read more here]
IdeaMap uses statistical concepts such as optimization and variable-regression analysis to find
consumers' hot buttons... The technique... cuts through the difference between what customers say
and what they do.  
The advantage of this technique [Ideamap] is that people can’t be politically correct in their
responses... They can’t figure out exactly which issue they’re supposed to be responding to, because
each vignette has a combination of issues, and you’re throwing so much information at them so
quickly that they have to respond at a gut level. Then you sort through the data to figure out which
issues sway them. [Read more here...]
[Howard Moskowitz] I think has done as much to make Americans happy as perhaps as anyone over
the last twenty years.  A man who is a great personal hero of mine... Howard fundamentally changed
the way the food industry thinks about making you happy.  Assumption #1 in the food industry used
to be that the way to find out what people want to eat, what will make people happy is to ask them.  
And for years and years, Ragu and Prego would have focus groups and they would sit all you people
down and they would say what do you want in a spaghetti sauce. And for all those years, 20, 30 years
through all those focus group sessions, no one ever said they wanted extra chunky.  Even though at
least 1/3 of them, deep in their hearts, actually did.  People don’t know what they want.  As Howard
loves to say, “The mind knows not what the tongue wants”.

It’s a mystery and a critically important step in understanding our own desires and taste is to realize
that we cannot always explain what we want deep down. [See video here...]  

Malcolm Gladwell,
the best-selling author of The Tipping Point and Blink
(from his talk at TED Conference in Monterey, CA, February 2004)
[Ideamap] provides a very effective way to reverse-engineer competitors’ marketing by taking images,
slogans and phrases from competitor’s brochures and websites … to identify some surprising
weaknesses in seemingly formidable opponents.
Read the testimonials about the book from Academia and Corporations.
Seldom does a book come along from exceptional minds that combines wit, whimsy, savvy and
intellectual rigor, while at the same time being extraordinarily useful. Selling Blue Elephants is such a
book. Having coached some twelve thousand people over the last three decades, I have learned that
people can seldom accurately articulate the reasons for their preferences and choices. This book tells
you how to solve this problem and develop profitable products.

If marketing matters to you, you have to read this book!
Stewart Emery,
Coauthor, International bestseller Success Built to Last
(Wall St. Journal and BusinessWeek bestseller,
the Top 3 of Amazon’s Best Books of 2006 Editors’ Picks: Business)
Marketing researchers Moskowitz and Gofman (both of whom are also experienced in the field of
experimental psychology) offer a seven-step plan to identify and develop successful products...

Systematic, intelligently inquisitive and precise, RDE’s objective is to eliminate guesswork in the
process of reading the minds of consumers. [Read full review here...]
Focus groups and the trial-and-error method are flawed approaches to shaping your product for the
market, say the authors. Instead, they suggest the application of rule developing experimentation
(RDE), a disciplined, expedient process designed to optimize the appeal of a product to the market.
Already put to gainful use by such companies as Hewlett-Packard (NYSE:HPQ) and MasterCard,
RDE's aim is to discover what the customer wants in a product, even if they can't specifically
articulate the desire or need... [The approach] does provide an elegant, concise template that explains
how to create prototypes to generate samples (frequently tested through the web), then taps into
software applications and simple statistical formulas to measure responses, discern patterns and
estimate the contribution of each feature. This is not a mass-market approach; it looks to arrive at a
superb product for a select target population, though multiple audiences can be addressed through
varying your approach. [Read more here...]
The book begins by presenting best practices in RDE from some of today's top companies: HP,
Prego, Vlasic, and Mastercard. It then goes on to examine RDE,s use in innovation and design and
goes on to examine its possible uses in the international, political, bioinformatics, and finance areas.
Filled with real-life stories, this book will change the way people think about selling to their present
and future customers. [Read more here...]
In Selling Blue Elephants, RDE’s creators reveal how to systematically design, test, and modify
alternative ideas, packages, products, and services, to discover offerings your customers will be
passionate about...even if they can’t articulate the need, much less the solution!

Discover the seven easy steps that take you from cluelessness to clarity in just days... sometimes even
hours. Watch RDE succeeding in companies ranging from Hewlett-Packard to Campbell’s,
MasterCard to Maxwell House... and learn how to get the same outstanding results yourself, one step
at a time, every time! [Read more here...]
"Explosive!"

The HINDU
(the second largest newspaper in India)