OK, I laughed out loud when I heard that this tale about one of our discontinued products. Here’s a true “marketing” oriented story that illustrates how a little information, when left out of a tradeshow demonstration is, well, sometimes kind of funny.
We have five videos on our Podia Table Display website that show how durable this amazing product is. For example, in one video a Pontiac drives over one, in another an elephant steps it and it another we toss it from the roof of our building onto the parking lot pavement, and so on. Of course, the wonderful gizmo survives all the abuse. But prior to this newer, 2006 version of the clear polycarbonate capsule, we had the original model that was terrific in all respects except that it was not durable enough to withstand quite the excesses of misuse as the newer version is shown to do in the videos.
At a tradeshow a few weeks ago I demonstrated the product durability to a bright and energetic young fellow, who is also a relative and who shall remain nameless (Jason Whitmore). He was very impressed and a few days later he was in his office in downtown Kalamazoo where they actually had some of our Podia Tabletop Displays in use. He was so enthused about how wonderful the product is that he asked a fellow worker, “Have you seen how durable this thing is?” No, the person said so the hero of my story took it to a nearby room with a hard tile floor and threw it down, much like the video showing the toss from our roof. Well, of course, this was the older version and it busted apart into a scattered array of plastic parts! As he tells it, “Boy, was I surprised and was my face red!" Well, apparently I hadn't thought to mention that there was an older version the won't "pass the test".
As they say, don’t try this at home! Unless you have our Podia MenuPro model and then you can drive over it, crack walnuts with it and use it for batting practice. For a happy ending to the story, I have since congratulated the young man for his uncommon exuberance, treated him to lunch and replaced the older version with Super Podia MenuPro!
