Brand Relevance: Making Competitors Irrelevant - always yours

178 BRAND RELEVANCE
sleepy brand into a high - growth one. The percentage of households
that reported having used the product in this application
went from 1 percent to 57 percent in just fourteen months.
Arm & Hammer used the odor - protection property to expand
the brand to include products for deodorizing sinks, freezers, cat -
litter boxes, and carpets. There were other deodorizer brands,
of course, but only one baking soda solution. During the last
decade the fi rm added a special container for refrigerators and
an Arm & Hammer baking soda shaker.
Nalgene was a fi rm founded in 1949 to make polyethylene
laboratory equipment, such as bottles, fi lters units, and storage
tanks. In the early 1970s some of the scientists started using
one of the bottles to carry water on camping trips. An executive,
observing how useful it was to a boy scout camping exhibition,
decided to go commercial with it, and Nalgene Outdoor
Products came to life. It was a sleepy business until the controversy
around plastic water bottles emerged. The fact that
Americans discard 38 billion plastic water bottles a year, which
it takes 17 million barrels of oil to produce and which are not
biodegradable, started to become visible. 12 Nalgene bottles provided
one answer, suggesting a new application for its products
that promised to dwarf the outdoor focus. One lesson is that
although a sleepy business may not be attractive, its presence
gives it the option of participating in relevant trends. Recall
the Fiber One cereal brand that became a real asset when the
value of fi ber consumption became visible.
Customer Partnering in Concept Generation
Customers can be effective partners in the development of
breakthrough concepts by going beyond identifying needs to
actually proposing solutions, which can then be transferred
into offerings. LEGO, for example, uses its customer base to
develop, customize, and test new products. Over a hundred
users helped create LEGO Mindstorms, a kit that combines