Gillette's Path to Global Success
Gillette's Path to Global Success
The story of Gillette, one of the most successful global consumer-packaged good companies, well known for product innovation. It offers insights on the innovation, acquisition, and global strategies of Gillette. It is chronologically well organized and is filled with interesting examples and facts, as can be expected from its journalist author Gordon McKibben.
This book is aimed at practitioners and students of business. Although it covers consumer-packaged goods, some of the lessons are applicable to all product categories. There are five parts: "The Stage is Set," "The Search for Balance," "Fight for Survival - The Takeover Threats," "Fast Track to Global Leadership," and "Gillette's Global Culture in Practice." The last two chapters are perhaps the most important chapters in the book, considering Gillette is one of the truly global companies: 70% of its sales, 72% of its profits and 80% of its employees are outside the U.S.
This book does a good job of highlighting the keys to Gillette's global success. The chapter on the Sensor shaving system (razor and blade) is relevant and interesting. The Sensor shaving system is one of the enduring innovation successes of Gillette. Al Zein, who became the Chairman of Gillette in 1991 and was the head of "Sensor" project, is claimed to have directed his engineering head to first get the product in shape for testing and conduct a broad-scale consumer user test ("CUT" in Gillette jargon). Only later did Gillette figure a way to manufacture it, underscoring the fact that consumers come before manufacturing for Gillette. Gillette's marketing acumen was another driving force behind Sensor's success. The now famous tag line "The Best a Man Can Get" was born in the late 1980s for the brands Atra in the U.S. and Contour in Europe, but was used heavily for promoting Sensor. This advertising blitz was preceded by a teaser ad campaign that announced "Gillette is about to change the way men shave forever." Symons, who then was president of the Shaving Systems Group, was so obsessed with the masculine perception of the product that he wanted a proper masculine sound and feel as the package was ripped open!
Gillette also has its own new product organization structure that has contributed to its success. It has a program management system under which all technical activity...