Brand Relevance: Making Competitors Irrelevant - always yours

THE INNOVATIVE ORGANIZATION 343
subcategories. The business looks to substantial and transformational
innovation, but within the category. The resulting
offerings would draw on existing assets, including brand assets;
competencies; and market knowledge, and are likely to have less
market and organizational risk than offerings that venture away
from core businesses. The fact that a core business is close to
the market and to the technology of the offering means that the
business has a big advantage in both identifying and responding
to opportunities.
A good example is P & G ’ s Tide, which has had an average
of one incremental innovation a year for some sixty years but
has also aggressively developed substantial and transformational
offerings that have served to defi ne clear subcategories for which
Tide has enjoyed signifi cant price premiums, loyalty, and barriers
to competitors. There was liquid Tide in 1984, Tide with Bleach
in 1989, Tide High Effi ciency (HE) in 1997, Tide with Febreze in
1998, Tide with a Touch of Downey and Tide Coldwater
in 2004, plus several others that might also be classifi ed as transformational.
Tide Coldwater, for example, during its fi rst few
years, was used as an energy - saving product in seven million
American households. 9 Tide increased its share of the detergent
market from around 20 percent in the early 1980s to over 40
percent with a series of new offerings, each of which created a
new subcategory.
The Tide effort was in large part due to the Innovation
Leadership Team that was formed within Tide to create new
momentum.
10
Spanning functions, it included people from sales,
brand management, operations, fi nance, and more. The charge
was to identify some ten new Tide ideas each quarter, ones that
would potentially transform the marketplace.
Strategic Stubbornness
There is the risk that strategic commitment will turn into strategic
stubbornness. A lot can go wrong. The vision surrounding the