You frequently hear companies say that innovation is easy for others, but “in our category, there’s just not much you can do.” My response? Nonsense. There are no commodity brands, only commodity thinking. Don’t believe it? Consider the lowly Birthday Cake candle and read on …
What product can be more prosaic or pre-digital than Birthday Cake Candles? Everyone has a few stray ones in the kitchen drawer; leftovers from the new set we all buy once a year for one occasion or another. And yet, when was the last time anyone did anything new with them? (Perhaps it was those big, fat “number of your birthday” candles.) But wait….now there is ColorFlame™, candles that burn in different colors! This simple innovation that puts a new look on an old category. Distribution? Easy. What Wal-Mart buyer wouldn’t agree to put something new in the way of birthday candles on hooks next to the boring old birthday cake section?
So next time you hear that apocryphal quote by Charles H. Duell (Commissioner of the US Patent Office in 1899), who said that “everything that can be invented has been invented,” you can remind them that ColorFlame birthday candles are now available at their local grocer.