3M's POST-IT NOTEPADS "NEVER MIND. I'LL DO IT MYSELF."
Near the end of 1978, bleak reports came back to the headquarters of Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing (3M) Corporation in St. Paul from a four-city test market: This Post-itTM notepads idea was a real stinker. This came as no surprise, of course, to many of 3M's most astute observers of new product ideas; this one had smelled funny to them from the beginning. The company had ignored Post-it before it was a notepad, when the product-to-be was just an adhesive that didn't adhere very well. The first related product to reach the market was a sticky bulletin board whose sales were less than exciting. So why was it still around? For five years this odd material kept turning up like a bad penny in the pocket of Spencer Silver, the chemist who had mixed it up in the first place. Even after the adhesive had evolved into a stickum-covered bulletin board, and then into notepad glue, the manufacturing department said they couldn't mass-produce the pads. The 3M marketing crew also said you could only sell these things if you gave them away, because who would pay a dollar for scratch paper? So when the test market reports arrived, it seemed everyone who'd disparaged the Post-it notepad was right after all: 3M was finally going to do the merciful thing and bury the remains. Only one last try by two executives, Geoffrey Nicholson and Joseph Ramey, saved those little yellow self-stick notes from oblivion. Nicholson and Ramey knew 3M's marketing distribution network well, and they wondered why a product that they felt had obvious appeal had bombed. Had 3M's conventional marketing approach victimized an unconventional product? They were curious enough to fly to Richmond, Virginia, one of the test cities. Without that trip, 3M almost certainly would have ceased pilot production of Post-it Notes, retired the machinery they had