They laughed when I showed them my boogie

Melbourne Herald Sun, Friday October 19, 2012

At a teenage birthday party I joined in to show how smoothly I danced. Then I noticed the looks I was getting. Not admiration - more giggles. It was later pointed out that the moves might once have been smooth - but twenty years on they just looked quaint.

It happens to all of us, as you're leading a busy business life, you scarcely notice birthdays. Then one day you're calculating back to an event and stop with shock: what, was that five years ago? I thought it was just a few months back...

Yes the passage of time has a way of catching you unawares. But not just the humans - the products too.

How long ago was Fosters the coolest drink? When was Nine "the one"? Ford the sales leader? Or what happened to cigarettes, with all their jewel-encrusted paraphernalia?

When a product falls off the peaks of fashion, it can be near impossible to retrieve it. Oh it will continue its life, but never with that glittering superiority. And usually without the abundant demand and profits.

So it's important to be aware of your product's age cycle, and that of your customers. Are you still appealing to a buyer who has moved on, is there a generation gap you are not filling?

Think about music. If that's your field, in your time you've seen vinyl records supplanted by tapes which evolved to cds and then dvds and now to iTunes and a total change in the understanding of what a piece of music is.

Already it is morphing again and you don't have a file on your computer, your whole collection is held in the cloud. Quite literally: far out. Some of us still like a piece of plastic on the bookshelf, but then I've already confessed to being quaint.

Perhaps you have to be a genius like Steve Jobs to see the bigger picture of what is going on, and get in front of the advancing waves. He captured the music thing through iTunes and iPods. Then transformed the phone thing, then the tablet thing. Always one step ahead.

The only genius I can compare to Jobs is Ingvar Kamprad. Another slightly nuts ascetic, his unswerving vision built Ikea into the planet's biggest furniture store. His products have housed the whole world of ever-shrinking apartment dwellers with such attractive, low-cost practicality that they never go out of fashion. Because they have never been in it.

In the big-player field, the most successful has to be Nestle and how they have managed coffee. For many years Nescafe dominated the instant coffee market. Then an increasingly affluent middle class adopted espresso coffee, and smaller manufacturers had more of a chance through coffee bars.

So Nestle brought espresso into the home with their Nespresso range. All those beautiful machines, glittering coffee pods, brilliant commercials with George Clooney and John Malkovitch, tasteful sales lounges (you couldn't call them shops). And prices that brought in five times more per weight of the product.

Over a decade sales jumped 30 per cent a year all around the world - from London and Paris to New York, Shanghai, and of course Melbourne.

Competition has become intense, with Sara Lee's L'Or fighting hard and many copycats on the way now that patents are waning. So whether you like it or not, make space on your kitchen bench - by impulse or by gift, there will be a glossy coffee machine coming your way.