Посты автора Yoni Stern

Yoni Stern

Was it a Breakthrough or an Adjacency?

Published date: December 31, 2023 в 10:56 pm

Category: Brand and Marketing,Innovation,New Product Development,Strategy

This year, P&G’s Febreze celebrates its silver anniversary as a brand. But not all 25 years were a honeymoon. Launched in 1998, the fabric freshener quickly hit $100M in sales, but then slumped. In 2002, the brand was in danger of extinction until the company made a strategic decision: the Febreze brand, with its “Breath of Fresh Air” promise, would lead the company into its expansion into “Air Care”, a growth sector. The challenge was that the Air Care category was already dominated by protective goliath brands who would make entry very difficult. SC Johnson led the way with Glade followed by AirWick (Reckitt Benckiser), and Renuzit (Dial). SIT Innovation – Systematic Inventive Thinking ® was called in to help.

We all know the happy ending. Thanks to a successful entry in 2004, the Febreze brand thrived and, in 2011, joined the exclusive “Billion Dollar Brand” club. It has more than doubled those milestone sales in 2023.

So, what happened in 2002?

That was the year when P&G’s perfume chemists, Febreze brand team, and Innovation function members engaged SIT to help identify what breakthrough concept will help them enter this crowded field with an innovative, differentiated offering whose superiority would be obvious. Marketing already understood that price-of-entry into Air Care would require a spray (preferably not aerosol) which would need to be the first product launched. However, they also knew that plug-in air fresheners were the margin play and this is where they would need to win in order to achieve their business goals.

I was honored to be one of SIT’s experts to work on this project, alongside Amnon Levav, SIT’s co-founder. The SIT team was immersed in Febreze (not literally) for several weeks, including an intensive workshop in Cincinnati. The two highest rated plug-in ideas that the team generated through our approach were merged during convergence to form this concept:

Pulsating Plug-in. Habituation to one constant scent or level of scent is a problem that consumers are keenly aware of. They complain that a short while after beginning to use a Plug-in, they fail to notice the scent anymore and have no way of knowing that it is still working. To counter this problem, we will offer a pulsating Plug-in. Electrical heat will vary in strength or different perfume volatilities will be used in order to systematically and regularly alter the amount of scent emitted by the device.

Alternatively, the form will be dual chambered with two perfumes of different scents. So doing, the habituation to the scent will be delayed or non-existent.

This product, P&G’s first plug-in, was launched in 2006 and branded as Febreze NOTICEables, emphasizing the value the innovation delivered, moving beyond technical descriptors like “pulsating” or “dual-chamber”.

Just 5 years after entry, P&G’s Air Care portfolio had secured an impressive market share of 25%. Shortly thereafter, NOTICEables overtook Glade as the plug-in with the greatest market share. After a few years of sustaining this title, P&G rebranded NOTICEables as “PLUG”. The NOTICEables name was retired after 13 years of hard work, establishing Febreze firmly in the exclusive $1B+ brand club. According to Procter & Gamble’s (P&G) annual report for 2023, Air Fresheners account for 80% of Febreze brand sales.

25 years ago, Procter & Gamble executives realized that the company would miss a market opportunity window if they didn’t act fast. They had many valuable assets in place – strong brand equity, world-class perfume expertise, distribution supremacy, an extremely professional team with senior leadership support – but struggled to find the product expression that would cash in on them. It was a solution that seems simple and obvious in hindsight, but far from intuitive in foresight, so characteristic of SIT’s Closed World-type innovations, that became a blockbuster. It was a breakthrough solution that facilitated entry into an adjacency. Categorize it however you want; just make sure that you have several of them in your portfolio.

Happy Anniversary, Febreze!

Innovation Under the Threat of a Recession?

Published date: March 9, 2023 в 4:11 pm

Written by: Yoni Stern

Category: Innovation,Organizational Innovation,Strategy

Cutting budgets of new projects, whether they are under the bucket of “innovation” or not is commonplace in times of economic uncertainty. This phenomenon is quite logical, especially for those classified as “innovation”. Innovation’s ultimate goal, after all, is to spur growth. In a period when growth is pretty much out of the question, investment in innovation seems capricious. Companies need to become more insular, stop the bleeding, cut the “luxuries” they have become accustomed to in times of plenty, and weather the storm. Not to mention the shareholders breathing down the Board’s neck to show some sort of profit margin.

The problem, however, is that these companies are overlooking two essential aspects of innovation. Firstly, while the output of innovation should always be value-add (usually equivalent to “growth”), innovation should never be applied to issues that are not strategic to the company at that time. This is one of the ways that many companies inadvertently marginalize innovation: they imply that while the current projects circulating in the company are there to keep margins steady, these extra projects are for growth. “Innovation projects” are then perceived as nice-to-have additions to one’s everyday work (unless you happen to be the unfortunate one who received the extra work brought on by these projects. Then they are not-so-nice-to-have). Thereby, management separates innovation from the core activities of the company and only innovates when the company has excess resources to invest. Or – even worse – when they panic due to a need to react to a bold competitor move or other market threat.

But this is not where innovation efforts should be placed. Innovation should be applied to tough projects and processes that are already occurring in the organization. It should be used to improve them – to make them more efficient, more effective, or to leverage them for growth. Innovation should not be invasive, it should be a tool for getting the most out of what is already happening or what you already have. It has become somewhat of a slogan for us in recent years: “Don’t do innovation; innovate in what you do”.

I doubt that “thinking and acting differently to achieve your goals” becomes irrelevant in times of a recession. Perhaps the opposite is true?

Interestingly, for those bold enough to resource traditionally-defined innovation efforts, the research shows that this is the time for even more substantial ROI.

Professor Jacob Goldenberg of Columbia University Graduate School of Business pointed out to me that research shows that times of recession are when true change happens in the marketplace. When the market is strong, the large companies and small companies typically both grow by gaining more customers – but at a rate proportional to their current market share. When the market is small is when there is an opportunity to convert just a small group of customers from the competitor’s offering, thereby having a greater effect on market share and the balance of power post-recession. Those smaller companies who had wisely increased their expenditures during a downturn, taking an aggressive approach, are those who were able to come out of the recession market leaders. This implies that market leaders must take a similar approach simply to ward off their competition and retain their position in the future.

So, is a recession the right time to invest in innovation? Common wisdom says no. Then again, innovation isn’t about doing what’s common.

Fly High – The Fosbury Flop

Published date: July 28, 2021 в 2:22 pm

Written by: Yoni Stern

Category: Innovation

Whenever the Summer Olympics come along, I think about the many times I have heard my good friend and colleague, Dr. Jacob Goldenberg, so eloquently tell the story of (one of) the greatest sports innovations in history: the Fosbury Flop.

Common wisdom dictates that evolution does not result in revolutions – this is the difference between incremental innovation and breakthrough innovation. At SIT, we’ve been challenging this fallacy for decades. That’s why I love the true story behind the Fosbury Flop, which proves, once again, that common wisdom is a highly unreliable source for practical conclusions.

The Fosbury Flop? Never heard of it…

In 1968, a young high jumper by the name of Dick Fosbury revolutionized his field by winning the Olympic gold medal with a back-first flop that he himself had invented.

Why do we claim that this was revolutionary? There are several indications…

1) The Official Web Site of the Olympic Movement states: “An athlete will never again invent such a revolutionary style. Since this high jump approach, all specialists have adopted the “Fosbury flop” and the world record of the time, held by Soviet Valery Brumel (2.29 m) was quickly broken.”

2) Jacob and his colleagues asked 6 sports experts (sports historians, broadcasters, commentators) to each name the 5 most influential innovations in the history of sports. 5 of the 6 mentioned the Fosbury flop.

3) They also asked two dozen judges to rate the innovativeness of 9 sports innovations (including: the game of soccer, swimming techniques, the synthetic track, running shoes, and participation of women) along a list of parameters. The Fosbury flop rated highest overall and first place on its impact on sports, its originality, and its revolutionary nature.

Now that we’ve established that, what’s the story?

At the age of 10, Fosbury learned a high jump technique called the Scissors, which he had copied from some children in his school. At the age of 11, in the fifth grade, Fosbury’s Phys Ed teacher and coach taught all the kids trying out for track to use the Straddle or “western roll” style. After switching to the straddle and beginning all over, Fosbury fell behind the other jumpers competitively. He was very frustrated and asked his coach if he could revert to the old scissors style to get a better result and maybe boost his confidence a bit. His coach conceded.

So Dick decided to try his old style during his next competition. Feeling awkward yet persistent, Fosbury managed to clear his previous best jump of 1.63 meters, and then, facing a new height, knew he had to adjust something. With the scissors style, the jumper typically knocks the bar off with his/her behind, and sometimes with the movement of the legs. To avoid this, Fosbury tried to lift his hips up higher, which dropped his shoulders simultaneously. Fosbury cleared the height. He continued raising his hips until he eventually cleared 15cm higher for a new personal record, and even placed fourth to score points for his team. No one knew what Fosbury was doing as he transformed this old technique into something new, as each attempt was a little different. The opposing coaches checked the rulebook for legality since Fosbury had unexpectedly begun to beat their jumpers.

The next two years, 1964-1965, involved a slow evolution in the technique. Using his curved approach to the bar, Fosbury intuitively began to turn his inside shoulder away from the bar, to get his head over the bar sooner. Thus, the following year, pictures show Fosbury clearing the bar with his body at a 45-degree angle to the bar, no longer parallel to it. By the second year, Fosbury had fully evolved to clearing the bar with his back to it, arching his hips over, then un-arching to kick his heels over and land on his back in the foam pit. In other words, two years of small incremental changes were required for Fosbury to come up with the final, apparently radical, version of his jump.

Dick Fosbury had never envisioned being an Olympic athlete, even up until the 1968 Games. He maintains that he did not set out to change anything — in his own words, “I just wanted to play the game”.

And he did. As the story shows, his is an example that Radical innovations can be the result of a sequence of incremental steps (and oftentimes are – we just don’t notice them due to the perspective of time).

Thanks, Jacob, for sharing this story with me!

How One Man Changed the High Jump Forever | The Olympics on the Record