Eureka! Success Stories: Small Business Growth
Featured Success Story: HoneyBaked® Ham Company
"The odds of a family business succeeding from the third to fourth generation are three percent," says HBH’s chief executive officer, Craig Kurz. “That’s what keeps me up at night. We don't want to be the generation that fails." >> Download full story
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The Problem: As a seasonal business, HoneyBaked needed to boost their “non-holiday” sales. And with a number of failed attempts at leveraging national grocery chains, the next meaningful sales boost eluded them.
So they re-staged their communications to say why customers should believe that HoneyBaked was the best tasting ham – adding Reason to Believe back into their message. To test it, they took it to a national grocery store chain to do an in-store test they had tried two times before, and failed. But with the new message, they DOUBLED their grocery retail sales in just 2 weeks! |
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An interview with HoneyBaked® Ham CEO, Craig Kurz, about the Eureka! Winning Ways Experience
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The Solution: In their Eureka! Winning Ways session, 2 key discoveries helped them take their efforts to the next level.
Richards Industries
Giving new marketing prominence to an established in-house brand increased Richards sales for that line by 70%, just six months after their initial Eureka! Session. Now they’re ready to do the same thing for another line.
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The Problem: Richards Industries sterile valve line was growing – but barely. With an industry growth rate of 20% in that area and Richards only realizing 2% growth, it was clear that they were missing a real opportunity for revenue.
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The Solution: During the Trailblazer Development portion of their Eureka! Winning Ways the team learned a method to reduce risk by doing an entrepreneurial competitive, customer, financial and feasibility study in 30 days. The result: they discovered that they were holding their product to a higher standard than their competitors – but that higher standard made it look like they were actually failing on key statistics rather than winning.Questech
Questech believes its Eureka! idea will not only triple the size of their business, but change their industry as well. All it took was the Eureka! Winning Ways®-inspired confidence to think big and commit to trying it out. The results speak for themselves.
| The Problem: Questech already had a fully pipeline of ideas. And they spent a considerable amount of money on one idea that failed – twice! So they wanted to create new ideas as well as mine the old ones for hidden gold.
Changing their marketing to let customers know that the reason it doesn’t need resealing is because the sealant is actually baked into the product, not painted on helped customers believe the product would really work. They took their product to retail – and it worked. Customers bought! |
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The Solution: In their Eureka! Winning Ways session, the Questech team learned that telling the simple truth about how your product works to your marketing communications helps to “close the sale.” Eureka! - that’s what was missing. With their twice failed product idea, they’d provided a good benefit to customers: Tile you never need to seal again. But they’d offered no proof, so customers didn’t buy.
