FASE DE APLICACIÓN Y OBSERVACIÓN DEL TRATAMIENTO EXPERIMENTAL

--- Original Message --- From: Pierre Pelletier

To: Jay Abraham

Sent: Thursday, August 15, 2002 11:24 PM

Well our main business is in the alcoholic beverage industry. We sell to wineries and breweries various products to help them make beer or wine. In the wine industry you must trade between aging or bringing the product to market.

So in making testing a priority I tested some high prices verbally on a select few customers and it worked out amazing.

This chemical ages wine instantly, add a small amount to young wine and you get a wine that taste like it's a couple of years old.

The quantity needed is very small, and the product cost is around $30 dollars a pound. Normally we are happy selling it at $45 to $50 a pound. I brought up the price to $1000 a pound and the customer thought it was amazing. One guy liked it so much he asked that I not sell any to other wineries.

So testing really paid off, big time.

93. R Crandall

--- Original Message --- From: R Crandall

To: Jay Abraham

Sent: Tuesday, August 13, 2002 11:18 AM Jay,

All right, I'll finally bite. Following is an unusual case. You have the rights to use it, but I receive all the other cases in payment:

I've done a number of businesses in publishing - from newsletters, to books, to ghostwriting. I'm going to give a case from one of my

markets that is an unusual one - publishing of academic journals. The lessons here apply elsewhere. The trick was to use my knowledge of the major players in the market to create a new product that would have an strong niche. I essentially sold the opposite way others did.

A Negative Marketplace

In brief, the leading journals in the social sciences reject 90% of all papers received. And they are slow about it. They use volunteer

college professors as "peer reviewers." That is, each submission is read by about two "peers." These reviewers often are competitors of the people whose papers they are reviewing. They are often busy with their own work and are slow doing reviews. This means that authors seldom receive prompt, courteous feedback.

Reviewers also know that 90% of papers are turned down. Combined with research that shows that critical reviewers look smarter, they have a strong bias to reject papers. They make themselves look smart by listing criticisms, rather than saying what it would take to get a paper published. They also push authors to revise to suit reviewers' biases rather than to clarify the points authors want to make.

Journal editors often do not take control of their reviewers. Sometimes the reviewers are higher status than they are. Sometimes editors are overworked (they all think they are). Sometimes editors are not competent to make methodological judgments. This all results is very slow reviews. Editors often look for reasons to reject papers, rather than reasons to accept them. This decreases their workload. This tends to weed out unusual or new ideas. They are not "safe" for reviewers and editors to pass on.

Journals are funded for a certain number of pages a year. That means that the more papers than are accepted, the slower they are published.

Most journals take a year of more to decide and publish a paper.

The above is a brief overview of why the publication process is painful for many people. For instance, in psychology, the average new Ph.D.

never publishes anything. Many people are so discouraged by their first submission to a journal that they quit trying to publish.

A New Look

Publications are worth a lot to authors. (Something like $10,000 for the first publication was estimated by economists years ago.) They need them for promotion, tenure, status, grant money, and so on.

Most journals in the social sciences are free to publish in, but all the power is out of authors' hands. We simply reversed the process.

We focused on doing fast, polite reviews that advised authors how to get published. And we charged money for accepted papers.

The important factor was to use peer reviews and to not accept bad papers. But most papers have some potential to be published if they are revised properly.

Success

We found the right lists of potential authors and wrote them a

personalized letter. Many authors would never pay for publication.

But we didn't need the majority, we only needed a niche group who

appreciated our advantages. Authors appreciated our unusual speed, our courtesy, and the fact that their odds of publication went way up. The Journal of Social Behavior and Personality was born successfully. Word of mouth did most of the rest. Soon papers flowed in without effort on our part.

There were several added bonuses that were profitable for us.

Here are two:

1) When someone wanted to buy the journal, I turned it into a paid consulting job with him instead, and started a journal the same way for him.

2) People proposed guest editing special issues. I agreed. Then they did all the work to recruit, review and edit papers. They got the glory, we received the money, and our subscribers received an extra journal free. Win/win/win.

Summary

Of course, this particular product took a knowledge of a niche

marketplace. It took credentials on my part, and a willingness to take a small risk. But isn't that what every new product takes?

Rick Crandall, Ph.D.

RickCrandall.com