The Research Poster Printing Specialists: Fill & Download for Free

The field of chemistry largely doesn't believe in preprint servers. In fact, the top chemistry journals, notably JACS and Angewandte Chemie have strict no preprint policies and will reject the paper if it sees the article in a preprint server in particular arXiv.From JACS[1]The Journal of the American Chemical Society considers for publication only original work that has not been previously published and is not under consideration for publication elsewhere. When submitting a manuscript, an author should inform the editor of any prior dissemination of the content in print or electronic format. This includes electronic posting of conference presentations, posters, and preprints on institutional repositories and any other Web sites. Any content that has been made publicly available, either in print or electronic format, and that contains a significant amount of new information, if made part of a submitted manuscript, may jeopardize the originality of the submission and may preclude consideration for publication.Angewandte Chemie[2]Communications (length: up to 15000 characters, including footnotes, literature citations, tables, and legends) report on experimental and/or theoretical studies in all branches of chemistry and adjacent fields. Longer Communications will be accepted only if their quality warrants special consideration and a written justification of their length is provided. The results must be of general interest or at least important for the development of an area of research. Details that are of importance to specialists (and potentially to the referees), but not to most of the readers, should be submitted as Supporting Information (see Section 4.3), which will be made accessible on the Web. The essential findings presented in a Communication or significant parts of them may not already have appeared in print or in electronic online systems (for example, in online resources, in reviews, proceedings, or preprints). Contributions that do not fulfill the criteria mentioned will be returned to the authors without further external review. All other Communications are sent to referees. Authors are welcome to suggest referees, but they should not suggest people who have currently or previously had a collaboration or any other close connection to any of the authors. We ask referees to consult the "Guidelines for Referees" when judging the suitability of a Communication for Angewandte Chemie.JACS also published a fairly lengthy analysis and discussion on the use of the Chemistry Preprint Server, a largely failed experiment that was shutdown when Elsvier sold www.chemweb.com Evaluation of an Experimental Chemistry Preprint ServerIf you are a chemist and you like your career, you wouldn't upload your manuscripts to a preprint server.Footnotes[1] Policy Summary on Prior Publication[2] Angewandte Chemie International Edition

If the Brexit referendum was not about immigration why did the Daily Mail, Daily Express, Daily Telegraph and Sun run headlines, day after day, week after week, vilifying and demonising immigrants, refugees and anyone vagueñy ‘foreign’?If the referendum wasn’t about immigration why did the occurances of race hate crime spike dramatically at the time?Why was it that schools for immigrant children daubed with racist grafitti?Why were immigrants abused in the streets by morons shouting to them to speak English or ‘go home’?Why did I hear people say things like “Now we can kick out all the Poles?Why did Theresa May make such a priority of closing borders to immigrants?Why did the government announce it was imposing a tax on employers for every immigrant they employed?Why did the Leave campaign issue a poster showing a crowd of refugees with the word “Enough!” in bold print?Why do immigrants who have lived here for many years, worked, paid taxes, settled and brought up children happily, now have been made to feel so uncomfortable that they are packing up and leaving?Why have applucations from EU nurses and doctors to the NHS dried up?Why have companies, industries reported that they are having difficulty in recruiting staff with specialist skills because people no longer want to come here?Why are universties reporting a sharp drop in applications from overseas students?Why are research institutes reporting on a ‘brain drain’?Why are companies, established here, moving out to countries where their staff feel more comfortable, more welcome?If anyone from the Leave side thought that the referendum was not about immigration then they should have stood up at the time to put a stop to the deliberate fanning of racism, the incitement to race hate, the vilification of foreigners, the violence and the abuseWhy not?Because it served the purposes if the Leave campaign to play the race hate card as hard as it could, and it did so, without any concern whatsoever for the vile consequences or the victims who sufferedI was, and am, utterly appalled and ashamed of the way that section of UK society behaved barbarically, ruthlessly, shamefully for political gain. It is an indelable stain upon Britain

The low-hanging fruit answer is obvious: in 1985, an ill-informed over-reliance on focus group research and consumer polling let Coca-Cola to abandon their iconic product‘s beloved flavor formulation in favor of the too-sweet, alien tasting replacement: the disastrous New Coke™. The official name of the reformulated product was Coke II™, which nobody called it despite one of the largest consumer global advertising campaigns in history.THE COLA WARS: PEPSI GOES NUCLEARCoca-Cola was spooked by a unconventional (and hugely popular) ad campaign that began in 1975 by rival Pepsi, known as The Pepsi Challenge. In a series of hidden-camera ads, Pepsi set up kiosks in malls around the US and asked random shoppers to take a sip of two unmarked soft-drink samples and say which one tasted better. The vast majority preferred the taste of the sample revealed as Pepsi over the other sample from Coke.Pepsi snagged a major celebrity for its TV ad campaign: from the 1970s television masterpiece Welcome Back Kotter, megastar Gabe Kaplan (Video) conducted some of the first shopping-mall tests in the Pepsi Challenge. America trusted Kotter to make them laugh as they tuned in each week to Kaplan’s show. Now they were going to entrust their carbonated soft drink brand preference to him as well. The stakes couldn’t be higher ;-)The hidden-camera commercials showed real people giving real reactions to their taste tests, but the campaign was backed by Pepsi’s $1 million scientific study conducted by an independent research firm. The research firm conducted taste tests with 100,000 members of the public selected to accurately represent a cross-section of the soft-drink consumer market, and the results showed a clear preference for the taste of Pepsi over the taste of Coke.Coca-Cola made several attempts (in court, PR campaigns and outside-expert reviews) to challenge and discredit The Pepsi Challenge and the independent studies that supported it. Unfortunately, Coke’s counter-research with secret consumer testing that replicated the challenge produced results almost identical to Pepsi’s. The courts refused all of Coke’s legal challenges and efforts to pull the ad campaign off network television.COCA-COLA’S EXISTENTIAL CRISISCoca-Cola had enjoyed a commanding lead over Pepsi in sales and market share for decades. But the Pepsi Challenge turned out to be more than an expert-level trolling exercise of a second-place underdog. Pepsi sales steadily increased as consumers switched from Coca-Cola, whose sales declined at the same rate of Pepsi’s growth.In 1984, Coca-Cola’s head of market research brought the company’s CEO the results of a comprehensive study conducted by the research team. According to the branding legend Harold Burson, who was working for Coca-Cola’s CEO at the time as a $150,000/month marketing consultant, Coke’s head of research brought three large poster boards to the CEO’s office as visual aids for the bad news he was about to deliver."We have a serious problem," he said. He unveiled one of the boards. It showed a chart with a blue line for Pepsi and a red line for Coke. The blue line was going up and the red line was going down. If nothing changed, they were going to intersect in 1990.If Coca-Cola didn’t change course and forcefully respond to stop Pepsi’s growth, Coke would lose its leadership dominance in the soft drink market to Pepsi within six years.WEAPONIZING RESEARCH WHILE IGNORING THE OBVIOUS: Consumers can’t be trusted to know what they likeSince Pepsi changed the game by using consumer research and blind taste tests to convince the public to switch to Pepsi because it tasted better than Coke, Coca-Cola decided consumer research and focus groups were the key to preventing Pepsi’s ascendance. They also decided that brute force would be necessary:Pepsi spent $1 million on their taste test study with 100,000 consumersCoke responded by spending $4 million on market research, focus groups and formula variation tests involving more than 200,000 consumersThe super-secret market research was the first phase of a super-duper-secret initiative known only to a small group of Coca-Cola executives, who feared leaks could allow a counter-move by Pepsi or lead to an uprising among bottlers and distributors Coke relied upon to get their soft drinks into national grocery chains, movie theater fountains, fast food restaurants and hundreds of thousands of standalone coin-operated vending machinesCOKE’S MASSIVE SCIENTIFIC STUDY RESULTS ARE LITERALLY BITTERSWEETCoke’s findings in this massive-scale research and consumer testing effort were almost identical to the smaller challenge research they’d previously conducted, as well as what Pepsi found and promoted as the Pepsi Challenge. Consumers overwhelmingly preferred the sweeter Pepsi over the more neutral Coke. Further research testing other sweeter beverages in the place of Pepsi reinforced the previous results: Coke lost to beverages with a sweeter taste in almost every case.This critical aspect of both company’s research would only be appreciated much later, as the Cola Wars entered the “Forever Cola War” phase. Did you know that we’re still losing blood, treasure and corn syrup sweetener in a war most of us forgot about long ago? #NeverForget.This reproduction of an internal Coca-Cola slide presentation shows the company’s interpretation of the soft-drink market in 1980. Coca-Cola began to view Pepsi differently than in the past, when they were essentially a nuisance and distant-second competition. After The Pepsi Challenge boosted Pepsi’s sales, the leadership at Coke saw trends in which Pepsi was rapidly gaining brand value as the better tasting, more modern soft drink. The trends they interpreted saw Pepsi gaining at the expense of Coca-Cola, which was becoming a dated product that failed to satisfy modern tastes. As the upward-swooping red arrow suggests, they believed their salvation was embodied in launching New Coke. Which was not what happened.THE SWEETNESS TABOO: Coca-Cola’s Manhattan ProjectOnce the decision was made to reformulate Coke to appeal to the sweeter taste that consumers involved in research by both Pepsi and Coke preferred, the secret effort known to those involved as Operation Kansas expanded to include product scientist, chemists, marketing specialists and a handful of trusted Coca-Cola veteran employees necessary to move the enormous sourcing, production, bottling, distribution and logistics involved.Coca-Cola fabricated five variations of a new formulation, with varying degrees of sweetness and several modifications that replicated aspects of Pepsi’s Mouthfeel (the experience above and including taste that factors carbonation and the size of carbonation bubbles; serving temperature; chemical changes that occur within the mouth and throat; and the abstract, mysterious qualities of ‘satisfaction’, ‘thirst-quench’, ‘refreshment’ and ‘aftertaste’).The monumental effort took more than four years of trial and error as well as consumer taste tests that misled participants by conducting the tests in cities far from any Coca-Cola operation, and under the guise of academic research in which “foreign soft drink brands” were evaluated to see how American tastes differed from people overseas. Several ruses with different cover stories were also used to obtain public feedback on the new formulations.SECRECY, DECEPTION & LIES: DARK UNDERBELLY OF THE COLA WARSOnce the final decision was made and a formula was selected to replace the Coke taste known to its fans as reliably unchanged for decades, the expectation of keeping New Coke secret (which they managed to do for the entire four-year Project Kansas effort) was no longer an easy feat.As a global brand with far-flung vendors, facilities around the world, multiple ad agencies, bottling partners, warehouses, and source materials like aluminum for their cans… Coca-Cola is one of the largest buyers of bulk rolled aluminum in the world, and changes at that scale tend to get attention and leak quickly.So Coca-Cola did what anyone who has a secret does… they lied to those closest to them. Coca-Cola:Told its employees in Puerto Rico, where the syrup based on the new formula was being manufactured, that the formula was for Cherry Coke, which was recently introduced.Sent artwork to package manufacturers outlining a change in design of the packaging for the Coke brand that touted 20% fewer calories.Sent a memo to its bottlers urging them to reduce inventories because a new design would incorporate a new logo marking the company’s 100th anniversary in 1986. “What Coke really wanted was for their bottlers to deplete their inventories,” Meyers said.Used the code name “Kansas” in all communications and references to the project. The name was taken from the company’s association with the late William Allen White, a noted Kansas newspaper editor. White once described Coke as “a sublimated essence of all that America stands for . . . a decent thing, honestly made, universally distributed, conscientiously improved with the years.”Placed orders for fake promotional material with several printing companies. Parts of the printing plates used to print the fake material were correct, and Coca-Cola officials took the correct parts from each plate to print the correct promotional material.Divided up the work on the project among offices in London, the Netherlands, California and New York to “hamper the news flow.”Shot most of the advertising photography in London to limit the chance of the new can’s being seen in the United States.Told lid manufacturers that the gold lids — used to introduce the new Coke in the old cans until newly designed cans are available — were being added to mark the company’s 100th anniversaryWhen New Coke launched on April 23, 1985 with a marketing push that saturated TV, newspapers, magazines, local news stories and Coca-Cola celebrity surrogates doing the rounds on talk shows, America went out and gave New Coke a try.Then America decided they hated it. Protests were held. Coca-Cola headquarters was swamped with angry phone calls. Petitions were circulated and signed. And Coca-Cola’s sales started a free-fall worse than anything projected due to the Pepsi Challenge.New Coke was the flagship product at Coca-Cola for 77 days. While the launch of New Coke is known as the worst product decision in the history of mankind, their response to the public revolt is considered one of the best and most effective public relations turnarounds ever. When Coke’s CEO assembled a meeting with key rank-and-file employees who were recognized as veteran Coca-Cola loyalists who bled carbonated carmel liquid, the CEO asked the group, “How are we going to survive this?”In the telling of the meeting recalled by marketing legend Harold Burson, a gruff veteran employee with a thick Southern accent who was one of the top people in Atlanta named Earl set the course without any sugarcoating.Burson:“Earl had one of the deepest Southern accents I have ever heard. He said, "We have to be very apologetic. We have to beg for forgiveness. We have to be humble." Earl said, "Let’s be straight… here's how I would summarize it: We gotta eat shit."When Classic Coke returned after 77 days of New Coke Hell, the company response was so contrite, honest and self-deprecating that rumors began circulating that the whole New Coke fiasco was a marketing gimmick and a hoax, designed to spur outrage with an inferior product and a return to the original product that would remind America why they loved Coke (and didn’t need to switch to Pepsi).That’s a stretch, but Coca-Cola recovered and Pepsi languished.Epilogue:Coca-Cola’s descent into a cascading series of bad decisions and embarking on a bet-the-farm strategy with $30 billion in worldwide sales on the line showed a breadth of failures in risk management, due diligence and what happens when a company’s focus is solely on spreadsheets, rather than the ground truth’s factors that can’t be quantified.Coca-Cola failed to grasp two critical facts in switching their formula to chase Pepsi’s sweet taste by making their product even sweeter. One is an empirical fact that any consumer testing professional could have explained to Coke’s executives: The human palate has a predisposition, and when comparing one taste that is sweet and another less so, almost all of us will identify the sweeter item as “tasting better.”But tasting better is not the same as “the one I like.” The Pepsi Challenge benefitted from the natural bias people have to connect “sweeter” with “better”, but it failed to prove the soft drink people want wasn’t Coke. Decades of sales dominance by Coke should have proven that sweet or not, consumers bought more Coke than Pepsi.The second critical fact Coke overlooked was brand affinity. How one of the most iconic brands in the world failed to factor the emotional bond consumers had to Coke is amazing. Coke had no excuse in forgetting that tastes and smells evoke memories. When someone drinks a Coke as an adult, it can evoke enjoyable memories from their childhood when they were also drinking their Coke after their first kiss — or shared a Coke with their dad at a baseball game.Taking away the familiar flavor took away the connection to fond memories for some, which obviously makes it more difficult for Coke drinkers to enjoy a product that tastes unlike what they remember, and fails to spark the memories and feelings tied to the original formulation.Lucky for Coke, their existential threat was only 77 days longs; their response was excellent and allowed the company to grow, prosper, and maintain the loyalty of the people who drink it. Most brands that screw up on this scale have a different future awaiting them: the trash bin of history’s epic failures.Did I mention Bill Cosby launched the debut TV ads on national networks?