Tuesday, 17 January 2012

Innovation and P&G

Read an interesting article today on how P&G have tripled their innovation success rate






Innovation is truly at the heart of Proctor and Gamble and has allowed them to achieve tremendous year on year growth. However in the early 2000s only a very small percentage of its new products were meeting their revenue and profit targets.

Fast forward to today and P&G has tripled its innovation success rate, the result of a strategic effort by P&G over the past decade to systematize innovation and growth. P&G has no misconceptions of their history and completely understands how innovation is an incremental part of the company’s success story.

P&G recognized growth "couldn’t come from simply doing more of the same thing” CEO Bob McDonald notes “We know from our history that while promotions may win quarters, innovation wins decades.”
A key example of this strategic effort is that of “Tide,” A laundry detergent and the company’s biggest brand. The well established “Tide” brand performed consistenly for P&G. Early 2000s however, it was no longer growing fast enough to support P&G’s needs.

A decade later and Tide’s revenues have almost doubled. How you ask? Well previosuly the tide brand consisted of only one product; laundry detergent. Today however, the tide name has an extensive product mix (Tide Stain Release, Swash Odour Spray to name a few).

P&G has also taken the brand to emerging markets. With research showing that 80% of consumers in India wash their clothes by hand, P&G saw an opportunity. The team came up with “Tide Naturals” which cleaned clothes well without causing irritation to the consumer’s skin. Perfecting this innovative surge was P&G’s pricing of TideNaturals, 30% lower to comparable cleaners.

Tide is a shining example of taking product and adding the innovative prowess of P&G and their vision to create new product lines.

But what about an entirely new business Model? Can P&Gs innovation stretch that far?
It seems so. Tide Dry Cleaners was setup when a team began exploring ways to disrupt the dry cleaning market and arose from the general conception of traditional dry cleaners being, “unfriendly, dingy” places with inconvenient hours. It's appears that P&G's innovation is as sustainable as it is brilliant.

Author: Declan Egan
http://www.linkedin.com/profile/edit?trk=hb_tab_pro_top


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