Not long ago, the Consultant debunking unit (CDU) went to its email inbox and found a call for help. “Could it be true?” wrote an anguished reader. “Are consultants right when they say that what we’re doing in our company is the equivalent of selling ice to Eskimos? We need to know! And please don’t tell us to chill!”
Never one to shy away from a cry from the cold, the CDU set out to defrost this complex premise. The assumption, which has long gone unquestioned, is that an ice salesman would have a snowball’s chance in hell of selling ice to Eskimos. “There are mountains of ice around Eskimos,” says Jon Spoelstra, author of爱斯基摩人的冰：如何销售没人想要的产品(Harper Business, 1997). “And even with all of that ice, they probably make more. After all, it’s a lot easier to throw a few ice cubes into a glass than it is to chip ice off your wall.”
But what are the cold, hard facts? Time for the CDU to start this ice capade. Dropping anchor in Anchorage, Alaska, the CDU talked with Steve Sommerfeld, owner of Alaska Pure Water Products Inc. If anyone knows about selling ice in Alaska, it’s Sommerfeld.
Sommerfeld说：“从事水业务，从事冰业务是很自然的。”他决定在进行全面的市场研究后继续进行明显的线路扩展。他笑着说：“我们将自己的名字放在'冰'下的电话簿中，并接到了一堆电话。”结果？冰川冰公司除出了立方体，装袋和散装的冰外，冰川冰还针对高端市场，计划出售干冰，纯净的冰，甚至是收获的冰山。是的，但是他可以向爱斯基摩人出售冰吗？索默菲尔德说：“人们说我可以将冰柜卖给爱斯基摩人。”“我认为这是一种称赞。我现在不会在这里做其他事情。”
接下来，CDU向南180英里前往荷马，并与Quinntek Ice Alaska的所有者Patrick Quinn交谈。Quinntek凭借每天踢出多达5吨冰的工厂，一批冷藏卡车，以及越来越多的顾客清单，是在基奈半岛上的强大存在，那里的经济是由钓鱼驱动的。不断供应Quinntek冰有助于保持捕获新鲜。
Quinn didn’t always have his assets frozen. Just five years ago, he was searching for an entrepreneurial venture to launch in Alaska. Seeking advice, he turned to a friend who worked at a local grocery store. “I was chatting with him one night in the meat department,” Quinn recalls, “and I asked, ‘If a guy wanted to come up here and start a business, what would he do?’ He and his partner spun around in unison and said, ‘Ice.’ “
There was no turning back. “Who would ever have thought a guy could make a decent living selling ice in Alaska?” Quinn asks.
And the all-important ice-to-Eskimos market test? Quinn recalls a call he received one summer from Seldovia, a remote village of Alaska natives on the Kachemak Bay. The village ice machine had broken down. “For three days,” he says, “we’d pack ice in wet lock boxes, drive to the airport, throw the boxes into this little plane, and watch it fly away.
“You deprive these people of ice, and it’s like keeping a fat lady from her doughnuts.”
For its final stop, the CDU headed north to Barrow, 340 miles above the Arctic Circle, where for 51 days between November and January, the sun doesn’t rise. It also boasts one of the world’s largest Eskimo settlements.
Once there, the CDU looked up Dennis Fast, who works for the Alaska Commercial Co. As branch manager of the 35,000-square-foot store, Fast is responsible for selling a lot of things — everything from Mexican food to furniture. He also sells ice to Eskimos. Why would the people of Barrow need ice? For drinks, for keeping coolers cold, for packing fish — nothing unusual. What is unusual, Fast says, is the length to which they’ll go to get it. “Never in my career did I think I would be selling a freezer to an Eskimo, putting it on a sled, covering it with caribou hides, and hitching it to the back of the guy’s snowmobile so that he could pull it across miles of snow to his village,” says Fast. “It’s actually happened several times.”
因此，CDU在另一个咨询案例上打破了冰。事实证明，将冰卖给爱斯基摩人就像爱斯基摩派一样容易。现在，我们听到的是将煤炭送到纽卡斯尔的什么？