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 Posted - 12/25/2007 : 9:15:49 PM
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Kiwi moves beyond shine on your shoes
Innovations stress comfort level inside
The Wall Street Journal
http://www.bnd.com/business/story/209159.html
For a century, Kiwi shoe polish remained pretty much the same -- just over one ounce of colored wax in a palm-size tin embossed with the image of a kiwi bird.
But about two years ago, Sara Lee Corp., whose predecessor company, Consolidated Foods Corp., acquired the brand in 1984, interviewed 3,500 people in eight countries about their shoe-care needs. What it learned was "a shocker," says Kiwi President Paco Casa: People don't care nearly as much about the shine on their shoes as they do about how fresh and comfortable they are on the inside. On a list of more than 20 attributes people desired in their shoes, shine ranked merely 17th.
Since then, Kiwi has unveiled a slew of new products, including "fresh'ins" (thin, lightly fragranced shoe inserts for women) and "smiling feet" (a line of cushions for heels and the balls of feet, antislip pads and strips that can be placed behind the straps of high-heel sling-back shoes). It has also emerged as a test case for Chief Executive Brenda Barnes's effort to revive the long stagnant conglomerate best known for its cheesecake.
"It became clear: Innovation was a key value of ours," Barnes says. But innovation itself wasn't enough, she says. Products had to be informed by the needs and desires of consumers -- something that had been lacking for many years at the sluggish company.
When Barnes became CEO in February 2005, she immediately called on employees around the world to help develop a vision for the company. Executives held focus groups with employees around the world and then synthesized the findings.
Products that emerged included Soft & Smooth whole-grain white bread, driven by kids telling Sara Lee marketers that they don't like brown bread and parents saying they want their kids to eat something more nutritious than white bread, and 3volution, an air freshener that rotates through three scents every 45 minutes.
While sales at Kiwi and the company overall are up, profits have been squeezed by increased spending on research and development and marketing. But the way Kiwi responded to the new focus on innovation shows how Barnes's efforts to push people to think outside the box -- or inside the shoe -- are beginning to pay off.
Kiwi was launched in 1906 by William Ramsay, a Scottish-born businessman who had a shoe-polish and disinfectant company in Australia. When he developed a new brand of shoe polish, he named it kiwi after the wingless bird that is the national symbol of New Zealand, his wife's native country.
Sara Lee executives learned that shoes and the way people wear them have changed over the years since Kiwi was founded. Today's footwear is made less from leather and more from canvas and synthetic materials.
Even the military, one of Kiwi's best customers since World War I, had been moving away from leather, partly because so much fighting now takes place in the Middle East, where desert sand makes canvas more sensible.
Most consumers today are more likely to toss out worn shoes than work to keep them in good condition. Women -- a huge market Kiwi had never targeted -- are most concerned about having comfortable, fresh-smelling shoes.
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Kiwi moves beyond shine on your shoes
