Well known consumer product brands enjoy the benefits of awareness, and suffer the limitations of expectations. It’s why so many innovations are incremental, if not simply variations on a theme (making toothpaste brands all but indistinguishable, for instance).
RB (formerly Reckitt Benckiser) seems to have cracked the code on this challenge, in part by daring to innovate new uses for its brands, and then deliver them with an internal approach that is best described as confidence.
“The best innovation goes beyond solving problems,to creating proactive care,” explained Phil Thomas, Global Category Director for Scholl. “When we’ve identified a broad scale unmet need that we can fulfill, we are driven by a belief that we can do it in a way no other company can match.”
This “special sauce,” as Thomas puts it, was very evident in its successful rollout of the Scholl Velvet Smooth Express Pedi, an electronic foot file hard skin removal that launched across 52 markets in 2014.
Little more than a year earlier, the product didn’t exist…
Read the entire essay at Forbes