Folgers Crystals

Folger's Coffee spent years, a small fortune, and three tries at bringing out a freeze-dried coffee that "tasted, smelled, and looked like fresh-brewed coffee." Each time, consumers voted thumbs down, saying, "It just doesn't taste enough like fresh-brewed coffee."

Finally, the third (and last) product development project and market testing was completed with improved, state-of-the-art, freeze-dried coffee crystals that looked and tasted like fresh-brewed coffee, and even real coffee aroma captured in the jar. It was discovered that the key target consumer group, freeze-dried coffee users, were accustomed to their instant coffee and really didn't know or like actual fresh-brewed coffee!

(Quoted from http://www.quicken.com, without permission, "fair use" assumed.)

Known for the series of commercials that would show a typical place where brewed coffee might be served (restaurant, office, etc) while a whispered voice-over would say "We've secretly replaced their regular coffee with Folgers Crystals, let's see if they notice", followed by them (amazingly) not being able to tell the difference!

The FolgersCrystals effect in action:

A friend of mine was working "subversive XP" recently. Management insisted on full design documentation up front. My friend lobbied and argued to no avail, so he finally agreed. He sat down and cut-and-pasted totally random segments of design docs he had available, added a couple of diagrams, formatted it up and submitted it. Total time spent: one hour.

It was received so well that, ironically, his group was held up to the company as the shining example of how to do design docs.

That looks a bit risky to me. In an academic environment it would be plagiarism. -- JohnFletcher

{I read that to mean his friend copied his own design docs, so his only sin would be claiming to have designed up front what he actually documented after development.}

Note that, for a consultant, such activity would constitute felony fraud. You can go to jail for that. Very phunny.

You can go to jail for being lazy and horrible at your desk job? Puhleez! The nonsense passed off as knowledge these days!

CategoryFoodAndDrink