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U.s. mousetrap manufacturers

About Woodstream Corp. About Victorpest. com We offer the broadest and deepest selection of quality rodent control products at competitive prices. Victor® is recognized as a world leader in the rodent control category and has been a trusted brand name since 1890. Victor® revolutionized the rodent control market 100 years ago with the invention of the spring-based Victor® Mouse Trap. Of the more than forty-four hundred mousetraps patented, fewer than two dozen have earned their creators a cent. http://www. americanheritage. om/content/better-mousetrap The snap trap’s annual sales are a company secret (whispers put them in the vicinity of thirty million). But the Woodstream Corporation is willing to acknowledge that the Victor snap trap outsells all other American mousetraps combined —including its own less popular models and those of sixty other U. S. mousetrap manufacturers—by a ratio of roughly two to one. When manufacturers found that women buy most traps, slogans got gentler: “ Mouse dies peacefully. ” But Woodstream’s study contained another surprise.

While it showed, as long suspected, that it is almost always the man of the house who sets traps and disposes of dead mice, it also revealed that it is the woman householder who today makes most mousetrap purchases, a development most likely caused by the decline of the hardware store, the domain of the male, where most mousetraps were bought and sold in the past, and by the simultaneous increase in the sale of nonfood items, including mousetraps, in supermarkets, the domain of the female. feminize mousetrap advertising.

Slowly, on packaging, the disembodied but nevertheless clearly male hand shown selecting a trap from a sales rack began to grow more delicate, with the suggestion of pink polish on the longer nails. Graphic renderings of dead mice disappeared. And instead of employing such promotional slogans of the past as “ No mouse will take the bait from this trap without losing his head! ” mousetrap copywriters began to use a gentler phraseology: “ Mouse dies peacefully,” “ No mutilation,” and even the curious claim, “ No harm to mouse. Priced at average retail of seventy cents apiece, glue traps were roughly competitive with and far easier to use than snap traps, and throughout the 1980s their sales soared. It was only after consumers began to realize that whenever they followed their glue trap’s instructions to throw out trap and mouse together, they were, often as not, depositing a still-living, still-struggling, and still-shrieking mouse in the garbage that sales began to level off. Not, however, before making a 30 percent inroad into the sales of American snap traps. ave found that it catches 18 percent more mice than the traditional snap trap. ————- He found several hundred devices for entrapping these furry little vermin, most of which, the researcher concluded, had some functional advantages over Mr. Victor’s invention. However, at the time, the Victor Mousetrap still had the lion’s share of the market. We did a quick search on the Internet, and found that since 1976, over 100 patents have been issued for new mousetrap devices. n order to gain some insight into market share, we checked the mousetrap business at Wal-Mart.

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There, we found Victor had a whopping 98% share of market, relative to other mechanical devices for killing mice. Few Wal-Mart shoppers have beaten a path to the doors of those inventors of better mousetraps. They haven’t had much of an opportunity, either. However, we also found that chemical means of extermination had nibbled away at the overall market. We found that in sales, chemicals had a 51% share of the market, whereas mechanical devices had 49%. Commercial significance isn’t technology driven, it is benefit driven.

To most consumers in the United States, chemical warfare against rodents is a matter of convenience. The user does not have to come face to face with the reality of his or her crime against another creature, nor does he or she have to dispose of the victim’s remains. In addition, chemicals require a lot less maintenance and they keep on killing. However, to consumers in many economies, it is a matter of who lives and who dies—people or pests. Thus, chemical mouse/rat traps have huge societal and economic implications. They are indeed a better mousetrap.

Please note however, virtue here is defined in terms of benefits, not technology. There are two basic problems with the Better Mousetrap Theory. First, as just noted, it focuses on hardware, and not benefits. Second, it puts all of the inventor’s strategic eggs into one basket. Better mouse-trappers tend to ignore the other elements in the new product strategic mix. In marketing literature, this mix is known as the “ marketing mix. ” In either case, the mix consists of several strategic components—product, price, promotion, place and policy—which can be anipulated, or adjusted to meet the needs of the marketplace, or to best market a product or service. Strategies will change, depending on the situation, but the basic components remain the same. This isn’t the end of the hurdles faced by a new product. In most discount stores there is little opportunity for point of purchase promotion. The task of in-store promotion falls to the front of the package. Promotional messages on the back or side panels are impudent, until sufficient interest is generated, and the shopper picks up the package.

If the front panel can’t capture the shopper’s attention, and generate enough interest to motivate the shopper to stop and pick up the package, the shopper will simply walk on. The major challenge faced by a new product is simply getting noticed. Mass merchandise/discount shoppers tend not to be leisurely shoppers. In general, they shop with a mission, and for the most part, they are not looking for new products. Even if they are, the competition for the shopper’s attention as he or she moves through a store is horrendous!

As a shopper moves down an aisle, every product, on both sides of that aisle, is in competition with every other product on that aisle for the shopper’s attention. This gives the term “ competition” a new and broader meaning. Inside a store, competition is everywhere. For this reason, many manufacturers rely on print and electronic media to get their product message across. Here, the small firm is at a definite disadvantage, as most small firms can’t afford to advertise their products in a meaningful manner. This inability can have a significant impact on the fourth component of the new product mix, place or if you prefer, distribution.

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