Kardborreband var i grunden ett material \u2013 inte ett varum\u00e4rke. Jag ledde \u00f6verg\u00e5ngen fr\u00e5n B2B till B2C: sex nya produktkategorier p\u00e5 femton m\u00e5nader, nya marknader i Asien och Latinamerika, och en kampanj som skyddade sj\u00e4lva ordet \u201ckardborreband\u201d innan det blev generiskt f\u00f6r gott.<\/p>\n
I slut\u00e4ndan blev vi nominerade till:<\/p>\n
(nominerade; Colgate-Palmolive, Spectrum Brands, The Clorox Company, Velcro Companies)<\/p>\n
(nominerade; Amazon.com, Microsoft, Netflix, Nintendo, VelcroCompanies)<\/p>\n
Alla sa att \u201ckardborreband\u201d betydde kardborreband, och det var just det som var problemet. Ju mer ordet kom in i vardagsspr\u00e5ket, desto n\u00e4rmare gled varum\u00e4rket mot ett \u201caspirin\u201d och \u201crulltrappas\u201d-\u00f6de \u2013 det blev generiskt och f\u00f6rlorat.<\/p>\n
Samtidigt hade f\u00f6retaget som faktiskt \u00e4gde namnet byggt sin verksamhet n\u00e4stan helt p\u00e5 B2B-sidan: industrikontrakt, sko- och kl\u00e4dtillverkare, ingen riktig n\u00e4rvaro p\u00e5 en hylla som en konsument n\u00e5gonsin skulle st\u00e5 framf\u00f6r. Jag gick med i ledningsgruppen som hade i uppgift att bygga en global konsumentdivision fr\u00e5n ingenting, och rapporterade till koncernens marknadschef och chefen f\u00f6r konsumentdivisionen.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Velcro was, at its core, a material \u2013 not a brand. I led the shift from B2B to B2C: six new product categories in fifteen months, new markets across Asia and Latin America, and a campaign that protected the word \u201cvelcro\u201d itself before it became generic for good. In the end, we where nominated for: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":460,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"page_builder":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-448","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-case"],"acf":{"company":"Velcro","my_role":"Senior Director, Consumer Division ","the_situation":"A hundred-year-old industrial company doesn't become a consumer brand by deciding to. It has to build the muscle for it \u2014 innovation, brand strategy, marketing, sales, digital, e-commerce \u2014 often from a standing start, and it has to do this while its most valuable asset, its own name, is quietly at risk of disappearing into the dictionary.","what_we_did":"We started with the unglamorous scaffolding: as a leadership team, we defined the group's consumer brand and sales strategy, a five-year P&L profile, and the KPIs and margin requirements everything else would be measured against. Then we built the organisation to match it \u2014 recruiting across product innovation, brand strategy, marketing execution, sales, digital and e-commerce, at both global and local level, with focus on the US, UK\/EMEA, Mexico, China, Hong Kong and Australia. For a stretch, I managed the US and UK teams directly in the absence of local senior leadership \u2014 roughly half my time was spent on a plane.\r\n\r\nOn the product side, we mapped a three-year innovation pipeline and moved: six entirely new categories launched within fifteen months. On the brand side, we ran a major brand equity project in parallel, specifically to build distinctiveness and reduce the risk of \u201cvelcro\u201d finishing the job of becoming a generic term before the business built around it had a chance to become a real consumer brand.","what_happened":"Within the first eighteen months we'd launched into eight new markets across Asia-Pacific and five across Latin America, with double-digit growth in the first fifteen months. And the brand \u2014 the actual legal, ownable asset the whole business depends on \u2014 was protected rather than eroded by its own success.\r\n\r\nThe part that doesn't show up in a launch report: proving, inside a hundred-year-old industrial company, that \u201cbrand\u201d wasn't a marketing department's pet project, but the thing standing between the business and losing the right to its own name.","end":"