B2B Environmental Opportunities and Pitfalls

Today American Public Media’s Marketplace featured a story about cosmetics manufacturer and retailer Lush. Lush has a policy of minimizing or completely eliminating packaging. The program presents both sides of the story interviewing marketing professor Patrick Barwise who defends packaging as preserving product quality and as a marketing tool. From a B2B perspective, this story shows the opportunities…and pitfalls…of growing concern for the environment. The story touches on everything that is important to the B2B world: supply chain, materials, and process innovation.

Read a transcript and listen to the story (Link)

Built A Better Mousetrap? Now What?

The former chairman of Young & Rubican, Peter Georgescu wrote about the combating the perils of commodification in October’s Fortune magazine. Georgescu argues that creativity and innovation are key to competing successfully in the 21st century. It’s interesting that he cites Google “new product a day” model as well as the creation of a tagline.

Georgescu does skip over a vital point (although he comes close to making it). Developing differentiation through defining and promoting the Unique Value Proposition. Building a better mousetrap isn’t enough. Communicating its unique benefits that make it better is essential. Ironically, Google did this very well when it first started. A PR campaign outlined why Google’s technology was different and better than what was out there. Today, all search engines use more or less the same technology, but only one is both a brand and a verb — anyone “Yahoo” anything lately?

Whether it’s B2B or B2C, creativity and innovation are important, but clearly defining that to the market is essential to reaping the rewards. If know one knows you built a better mousetrap, it’s just a mousetrap.

From Fortune (actually on money.cnn.com):

“There’s only one way to avoid the commodity quagmire, and it’s not easy: It’s through creativity. The good news is that at their best, American business minds excel at putting creativity to work. In the past half-century, Americans created everything from the Post-it note to the artificial heart to the Internet. Today Steve Jobs and nearly everyone employed at Google let their imaginations loose as a matter of course”

Full Article…(Link)

Related Link: Avoid Commoditization  by Kelly Howard, Senior Vice President, ABI