America is one stressed out country. We are, as a community, even more concerned with stress than our physical health. How do I know this? I have read the tea leaves, or rather, the bottles. What does this have to do with product development? Let me explain.

A few years ago, I began to notice a new product type emerging in the highly competitive bottled ice tea market. US residents consume over 500 million gallons of what is known as "ready to drink tea" in the beverage industry. Ever since the Snapple brand sumo’d its way in between the cola makers, the copycats popped up, such as Arizona Ice Teas and Nantucket Nectars, just as you knew they would. The ferocity between competitors has always seemed to focus on product variety, each player finding seemingly exhaustive uses for mango juice. The point is, these companies push out lots of "me too" product.

Back to about 3 years ago, in the beverage section at my local supermarket I saw a few shelves of new drinks, mostly teas, some juices, that featured healthful infusions of natural herbs such as ginseng or echinacea and even St. John’s Wort. This seemed a wise strategy for them to capitalize on the American consumer’s growing demand for alternative and "organic" health aids and miracle cures from Mother Nature.

I’m not sure which brand was first to market with these new health tonic-oriented beverages, I believe it was Snapple, but as seen with things like the PalmPilot and the IBM Thinkpad, it was a latecomer who figured out the market and really stole the show. I’m talking about Arizona Ice Tea’s RX brand, introduced within the last year, and a triumph in using package design to communicate their understanding of what customer’s wanted.

Here’s the interesting part:

A few weeks after I began to see this product in the supermarket, a funny thing happened. I no longer saw the Stress formula. Not because it was pulled from shelves, but because they were sold out...every week…for two months. There were plenty of every other variety of the drink, Health, Energy, Memory, but no Stress. It was conspicuously absent.

In retail shopping, shelf space is equivalent to stature. The brands that bring in the most profit (or have the most influence) get their products placed at eye level. Therefore, the popularity of the Stress drink is even more impressive given its shelf location, all the way down at the bottom, typically the position of the loser or the cheap-o generic knockoff. Yet every week, there it is, row after row of full shelves and the same three-bottle-wide gap on the bottom shelf. The wall looks like a smile with a missing tooth. I’ve since witnessed the same phenomena in 2 other stores. It shows that people seek this product out.

Is this a leading indicator of the current psychological condition of this country? Can we draw connections from this consumer quirk to our struggling economy? Are the laid off dot-commers this thirsty? Or is the AZRX packaging just really, really good (it did win a prestigious grand prize for package design at the London International Advertising Awards – a sort of Oscar for that industry).

Whatever conclusions you draw for yourself from this example, the primary lessons are:

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article-two:
From ABB to XML - Acronym Soup

Link: http://www.manufacturingnews.com/acronyms.html

The link above explains acronyms specific to manufacturing. For another good acronym resource, try the search-engine styled "Acronym Finder" at http://www.acronymfinder.com for any kind of TLA under the sun. But if you go there looking for DBR or FRT, you will still be SOL.

article-three:
Top Ten Shop Floor Tools or Professional Wrestling Holds
...from the MRT satellite office in Minneapolis, MN