When we hear tales of marketing success stories we often here about the tales of someone who came up with a great idea and pushed forward with it despite all odds and ended up becoming a superstar. While this has most definitely been the case in a number of famous incidents there have also been those times when marketing success stories came about completely by accident.
Here is a long lost tale of Americana that many may find inspiring. In the late 1950’s, a number of firemen got together and purchased a plastic molding factory as a side business. One of the products they produced was coat hangers. Well, that was the general idea except for the fact that the hangers were so narrow that coats fell off of them! Now, there really is little use for coat hangers that can??™t hang coats so it looked like the plastics company was going to take a loss. Then, out of the blue, the mailman delivered a package and noticed the coat hangers and said “That looks like a toy bow and arrow. What are you going to do with it?” Well, they ended up marketing the coat hangers as toy bows and arrows and sold over one million units. This is what gave birth to the Aurora plastics company, a company that would go on to produce and sell model kits until the early 1970’s. At its peak in 1964, the company was publicly traded and oversaw revenues of $50 million a year. Needless to say, Aurora turned a fiasco into a huge success story.
If there is a moral to be found in that story it would be to never give up or look on the dark side of things. Sadly, moping and looking at the glum side of things is what people generally do when problems arise. Sometimes, accidents and errors happen and this can lead to a number of problems for a company??¦but it can also lead to an opportunity as the Aurora Plastics example shows. The key to that story was the fact that the folks at Aurora did not let a major problem such as the incorrect manufacturing of a coat hanger and the inherent losses with such a mistake get them down. Instead, they simply made the most out of a bad situation??¦thanks in great part to an unknown mailman who probably never did get any residuals!