Marketing men try computer Nearly 200 top chemical marketing men played a management game in San Francisco's historic Mark Hopkins Hotel last week. The players had come to learn how computers can help reduce the risks involved in making marketing decisions. By midweek, the stream of executives leaving the meeting, sponsored jointly by the American Chemical Society's Division of Chemical Marketing and Economics and the Commercial Chemical Development Association, was plainly stimulated but a bit troubled. They had learned that the road to lower risk is likely to be long, tortuous, and expensive. The new products produced by industrial R&D are giving customers a growing number of products—often interchangeable—to choose among. This is an uncomfortable condition for the marketer, since his task becomes more complex and expensive. New product marketing efforts based pretty much on "best guesses" and similar seat-of-the-pants approaches are falling short. Hence the CCDA/CM&E management game, invoking operations research, mathematical models, and venture analysis. Many hurdles must be surmounted before scientific methods become a major force in marketing. Varian Associates' Charles W. McClelland says that too many industrial practitioners of operations research are techniqueoriented when they should be more intent on defining early in the game what the important marketing problems are. Plain-spoken Dr. McClelland recommends that development of operations research techniques be left to the universities. Industry marketing people, he says, should learn what the techniques are all about and then find a way to communicate with the operations research people with whom they're working.
Expert McClelland Many hurdles to top
Semantics, as always, are important. The technical meanings of words, at least to an operations analyst, can be quite different from common meanings as intended by marketing people. Industry would be well advised to seek out people who are problem oriented and can communicate clearly, Dr. McClelland declares, to do this kind of work. The cost of developing a competitive edge is likely to be high, both in time and money. Building a comprehensive marketing model for a company can consume several man-years. To marketing people, geared to the fast pace of everyday marketing activities, such time involvement spells high cost. Arthur D. Little's George B. Hegeman confirms that in actual dollars the cost of building effective marketing models can be high. Full-blown efforts costing as much as $100,000 aren't unknown. Generally speaking, the higher the stakes, the greater the cost of developing useful marketing models. But the cost of failure today is so high that the cost of minimizing the decision-making risks pales in comparison.
Phosphate found off N.C. coast Duke University marine geologists have discovered a "vast" deposit of phosphate rock off the coast of North Carolina. Dr. Orrin H. Pilkey, assistant professor of geology, says the find is about 30 miles off the coast in central Onslow Bay (between Cape Fear and Cape Lookout). The deposit covers at least 20 square miles
on the continental shelf under 60 to
Camera device A vast deposit of phosphate
ing the new find is still unknown. TGS's deposit, even though on land, is already more difficult to get at than phosphate deposits in Florida. The on-shore phosphate rock in North Carolina lies from 85 to 200 feet underground, and some of it is underwater or in swampy land. By contrast, the Florida deposits are 5 to 40 feet underground. The water covering Dr. Pilkey's find is thus an enormously complicating factor. Scientists from Woods Hole Océanographie Laboratory earlier found nodules that contain manganese, radium, uranium, copper, cobalt, nickel,
It p r o b a b l y d a t e s
a n d h e a v y sands a b o u t 100 miles off
back 15 to 30 million years. Dr. Pilkey heads a recently established group in marine geology at the Duke marine laboratory at Beaufort. One of the programs under way at the laboratory is a survey of mineral deposits off the southeast coast of the U.S. One tool they're using is an underwater camera device that's operated from the deck of the Duke research vessel Eastward (see cut). The device is used to help assess bottom sediments and formations. Companies such as Texas Gulf Sulphur, Magnet Cove Barium, and North Carolina Phosphate Co. have also investigated on-shore phosphate deposits in North Carolina. TGS, in fact, has already shipped its first load of phosphate rock from Aurora, N.C. (C&EN, April 11, page 19). The deposit being commercially worked by TGS and the new off-shore find may be part of the same deposit. They're about the same age, Dr. Pilkey says. The commercial feasibility of min-
the coast of North Carolina (at the Blake Plateau). They also found a band of phosphate 10 to 20 miles wide at the junction of the plateau and the upper continental shelf.
100 feet of w a t e r .
ASP still blocks negotiations American Selling Price (ASP) continues to pose a major stumbling block to the success of the Kennedy round of trade negotiations, commissioner Jean Rey of the European Economic Community said last week in Washington, D.C. During a whirlwind two-day visit with U.S. officials, Mr. Rey told newsmen that "no solution was reached on the ASP problem." But Mr. Rey is optimistic that a solution can be worked out. "I don't believe that the EEC and the U.S. have reached an impasse on ASP/' Mr. Rey told C&EN. "True, we haven t found a solution to the problem as yet. But we [EEC] are now considering MAY 30, 1966 C&EN
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