SWIFFER by AG LAFLEY AND ROGER MARTIN

In 1995, Chip Bergh was appointed general manager for P& G’s US hard-surface cleaners business. Bergh reflects, with a laugh, ‘It sounds like a very nonelegant, unsexy business, and that’s exactly what it was. It was not a strategic priority in the company. But interestingly, for all of our competitors, it was a core business. We knew our CEO never rolled out of bed and thought about this business. But for our competitors, every morning when the CEO was getting out of bed, he was worrying about this business.‘ The competitive landscape was challenging. Bergh’s brands included past-their-prime names like Comet, Spic ’n Span, and Mr. Clean. It was, Bergh notes, ‘about a $ 200 million business at the time, and it was in free fall.’ At one point in the mid-1970s, Comet had enjoyed a 50 percent market share of the category. By 1995, all of P& G’s brands in this category, combined, had less than 20 percent of the market.

Times had changed, and P& G had failed to change with them. There were fewer hard surfaces in homes, as fiberglass (and porous marbles and other stones) replaced porcelain. Competitors had introduced less abrasive cleansers that resonated with consumers; P& G had not. ‘It was clear we had to do something very, very different,’ Bergh notes. ‘We realized that our products were no longer relevant for the consumer and that we had been out-innovated.’

So Bergh challenged his team to think about where to play from an entirely new perspective that would be grounded in an understanding of the competitive landscape and of P& G’s core capabilities. ‘I took my leadership team off-site for two days,’ he says. ‘The focus was to come up with a set of choices that would make a difference on the business. The rallying cry we had around the new choices, and around the new strategy, was to fundamentally change the game of cleaning at home and make cleaning less of a chore.’ As ever, the starting point was consumer needs— like quick surface cleaning without muss and fuss, addressing a particular job and doing it better than current offerings. Bergh continues: ‘We asked, how do we leverage the company scale and size and technology expertise to fundamentally change cleaning at home? The key breakthrough for us was to start putting together different technologies that P& G had, but our competitors didn’t. How do you marry chemistry, surfactant technology, and paper technology? All of that led, within two years, to the launch of Swiffer.’

Swiffer proved to be a whole new where-to-play choice for the hard-surface cleaners business. It was a consumer-led blockbuster. BusinessWeek listed it as one of ‘20 Products That Shook the Stock Market.’ 6 Ten years later, Swiffer is now in 25 percent of US households. And as competition enters into the category it created, P& G is turning its attention to the next strategic frontier for Swiffer, asking what’s next.