George Santayana would have loved NewProductWorks. The philosopher who gave us the sage words, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," would have been thrilled that there is such a resource available to marketers, a repository of over 65,000 consumer products.

Formerly known as the New Products Showcase & Learning Center and founded by consumer product expert Bob McMath, the collection was renamed NewProductWorks after its acquisition in April by the Arbor Strategy Group (ASG), a marketing and management consulting firm. The collection was moved from its Ithaca, N.Y., home to Ann Arbor, Mich., where ASG is located.

McMath began collecting the products in the ’60s but the bulk of the collection is from the past 15-20 years. Housed in a 7,400-square-foot facility, NewProductWorks includes 26,000+ foods, 8,000+ beverages, 13,000+ health and beauty products, 6,700+ household products, and 1,000+ pet products.

Marketing geek that I am, I of course think NewProductWorks would be a smash as a tourist attraction (I can already see the exhibits..."Green Apple-Scented Shampoo Through the Ages"). But Arbor Strategy Group puts it to a much more worthwhile use helping clients navigate the minefields of new product development.

"People have used it in big and small ways," says Phil Roos, president and CEO of NewProductWorks and Arbor Strategy Group. "If you think about the new product development process, a complete process includes an analysis of the current situation, an opportunity definition stage, a concept development stage, and then a commercialization stage where you refine the product and the packaging and launch it. There is a way to use the collection in any of those stages.

"We try to give clients customer-driven growth strategies, but with a real eye toward actionability. And that’s how [acquiring the collection] fit for us because we were doing a lot of new product consulting work, and we were looking for a real-world, practical tool as an alternative to some of the ways companies have been developing new products. We wanted a way to beat the new-product odds."

Products are obtained through retail stores, from trade shows, and from manufacturers themselves. The collection is curated by McMath’s wife Jean. (The McMaths are always on the lookout for interesting products, Roos says: "When we were first looking at buying the collection, we were having lunch with the McMaths and we ordered in sandwiches and they wanted my potato chip package!")

The collection contains virtually any major product launched by a large company plus a lot of products that were only in test markets and some notable products from smaller firms. Products are arranged by category and within each categorythe most innovative products are prominently displayed. Some cross-category collections are being developed, including famous failures, famous successes, and a nostalgia area.

The Showcase is also used for legal and academic research. "There has been a fair amount of intellectual property work done there," Roos says. "A lot of times, the only package in existence for a given SKU is in the Showcase. Products have been used as exhibits in patent cases. Bob tells of one case where they were counting bristles on an eyeliner as part of a patent infringement case."

Revere the past

Roos has one main piece of advice for those developing new products: Revere the past and learn from it but also connect it to the future. "We try to have a strong understanding of trends, but then we link that to things that have and haven’t worked in the past. Some people focus on the future or on the past but not always both."

In addition, as obvious as it may sound, there must be a need for the product (or, in other words, its reason for being should make sense). Many products that fail are cute ideas that aren’t grounded in a fundamental need.

Roos cites the smokeless cigarette, which appealed to non-smokers but not to smokers, and bottled water for dogs and cats as prime examples of senseless products.

"The most powerful ideas are the simplest," Roos says. "They take an existing idea or brand and they don’t try to totally transform it but they give it a twist. For example, some of the things that are being done with Oreos, adding chocolate filling, seasonal varieties, etc. Cobranding and licensing are also options, such as Hershey’s chocolate inside a muffin mix. It’s pretty simple stuff but often it’s the most powerful because it builds off an existing frame of reference."

Roos ended our phone conversation with a very Santayana-like anecdote about a repositioning project in the household products area. "We had done what I thought was some great work, come up with a bunch of different concepts, and tested them with consumers. We had a winning idea. The client was moving forward; they were very happy with it. And I went through the Showcase and looked at that product category and there was every idea we had come up with and tested. Somebody had done it some time over the past 20 years but maybe the timing was wrong, or maybe they didn’t execute it right. Even the client couldn’t have told you those products had been launched and some of them were from their own company.

"Companies sweep failures under the rug without learning from them. So there is great inspiration in looking at what people have tried in the past in your category and even in other categories, because there isn’t a lot that is totally new in the world."