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New York Times, October 5, 2009 — Humans instinctively sort and classify things. It’s how we make sense of a complex world.
So when companies develop innovative products and services that don’t obviously fit into established categories, managers need to help people understand what comparison to make.
Brand Strategy Insider, September 11, 2009 — Marketing is a battle of categories. The brand is only a marker for the category itself. If you want an energy drink, you reach for a Red Bull. If you want soy milk, you buy Silk. Rental DVDs by mail? Netflix.
Creating a new category and then branding that category in such a way that your brand is perceived as the innovator and category leader (in both senses of the word) is the essence of marketing today. To create a new category, however, you have to think different, not better.
Knowledge@Wharton, July 15, 2009 — In Unlocking Opportunities for Growth: How to Profit from Uncertainty While Limiting Your Risk, authors Alexander B. van Putten and Ian C. MacMillan offer a tool they call Opportunity Engineering (OE), which shows companies how to engineer the risk out of uncertain opportunities in order to pursue more high-payoff innovations. OE, the authors note, is both a tactical approach and a mindset. It provides a specific way of valuing opportunities, using proprietary software, that enables companies to plug in the parameters of a project and determine its potential quickly. In short, the authors say, OE helps inculcate a culture of innovation. Below is an excerpt from their book.
Fast Company, July 1, 2009 — On a Tuesday morning in April, the presidents of three of the largest restaurant chains in the country slip into an unmarked white van in Orlando, Florida, and embark on an unprecedented mission — sharing their latest trade secrets.
You know their brands: $3 billion — plus Olive Garden, with its heaping bowls of pasta and all-you-can-eat breadsticks; $2 billion — plus Red Lobster, which introduced middle America to the wonders of fried shrimp; and nearly $1 billion LongHorn Steakhouse, whose variations on a theme include steak stuffed with fontina cheese and wild mushrooms.
You probably don't know they're part of the same company, Darden Restaurants. It's the country's largest full-service restaurant operation, the 29th-largest employer in the United... continue reading
Knowledge@Wharton, June 10, 2009 — When Guy Kawasaki talks about business innovation, as he did recently at a University of Pennsylvania technology conference, he brings more than 25 years of major-league experience to the conversation — a background that the good-humored investor and entrepreneur calls "my checkered past." After getting a psychology degree at Stanford and an MBA at UCLA, the Hawaii-born Kawasaki became the second software "evangelist" at Apple Computer, where his job from 1983 to 1987 was to convince people to create software for the Macintosh. Kawasaki fondly recalls his colleagues at Apple as visionary, driven and "arguably the greatest collection of egomaniacs in the history of California — though the record has subsequently been broken by Google."
Knowledge@Wharton, April 20, 2009 — Each year Fauchon, one of France's most celebrated luxury grocers, dresses up its best-selling éclairs to be launched in their haute couture collection of the season. The autumn 2008 collection features 34 individualized éclairs in an extravagant display of premium foods photographed in the style of the best high fashion catalogues. Meanwhile, Parisians, expats and tourists alike line up at the celebrity Paris bakery, Poilâne, to buy the famous miche, a loaf of bread that is still made by hand and whose recipe has not changed since the bakery was founded in 1932.
BusinessWeek, April 2, 2009 — Since becoming chief executive of Procter & Gamble (PG) in 2000, A.G. Lafley has never had it tougher. Shares of the world's biggest consumer-products company have lost a third of their value since last fall. U.S. shoppers are trading down to private-label products from premium-priced brands such as P&G's Tide, Gillette, and Pampers. And the economic downturn is spilling into developing nations where P&G has notched its best growth. Lafley, nonetheless, seems undaunted. The 61-year-old sat down in his Cincinnati office with BusinessWeek's Roger O. Crockett to talk about managing through the recession. Here are edited excerpts:
New York Times, March 30, 2009 — anyone who has dreamed of creating his own glossy color magazine dedicated to a hobby like photography or travel, the high cost and hassle of printing has loomed as a big barrier. Traditional printing companies charge thousands of dollars upfront to fire up a press and produce a few hundred copies of a bound magazine.With a new Web service called MagCloud, Hewlett-Packard hopes to make it easier and cheaper to crank out a magazine than running photocopies at the local copy shop.
Chicago Tribune, March 30, 2009 — Borrowing from a ship’s berth or a train’s sleeper car, developers are moving beyond budget accommodations and gambling that in tough times travelers looking for a little pampering at lower prices will embrace micro-hotels.
The concept of a hotel room the size of a suburban bathroom has spread across Europe in recent years. And as the U.S. economy deteriorates, interest in the idea has grown, especially in high-priced markets such as New York City, where there are fewer options for budget travelers.
BusinessWeek, March 16, 2009 — Wal-Mart Stores (WMT) has completely overhauled its oldest and biggest store brand, a move likely to send shock waves through the ranks of branded grocery manufacturers around the globe.
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