Love Your Product and Live Longer
Daniel Carasso, former head and still honorary chairman of Groupe Danone, died peacefully in his Paris home in May at the ripe old age of 103. This longevity is a tribute to a lifetime of yogurt.
The story began in Spain. Carasso’s father, Isaac, a physician, migrated from Thessaloniki, Greece, to Barcelona and started a business in 1919 to sell yogurt in Spain using cultures from the prestigious Pasteur Institute. He named the yogurt Danone after son Daniel’s nickname. Throughout its early years Danone yogurt was marketed as a health food and sold by prescription through pharmacies. In 1929, Daniel Carasso, having studied business and bacteriology, established the Danone brand in France.
Carasso and his company survived the Great Depression, World War II, post-war recessions, mergers and acquisitions, and changing consumer lifestyles to transform yogurt from an obscure ethnic food to a worldwide sensation. His story holds inspiring lessons about the healthiest ingredients in business: innovation, collaboration, and long-term commitment.
Along the way, Carasso remained dedicated to yogurt no matter what happened. He ignored the beginning of the Great Depression because he was too busy trying to find dairy stores for his product in France, as the New York Times reported. After fleeing the Nazis in 1941, he found U.S. partners with whom he created the American version, under the name Dannon. Yogurt rose from obscurity and niche markets into the mass consumer mainstream when adding fruit jam to the sour product proved a marketing breakthrough. The American Dannon was sold to Beatrice Foods, and Carasso returned to Europe after World War II to grow Danone into a global brand, merging several times along the way to form Groupe Danone in 1973. In 2008, the Groupe had worldwide sales of $20.48 billion.
Carasso’s success involved a lifetime of innovation, yet the innovations were often very simple. Enhancements to make a product more user-friendly can quickly propel something from the margins to the mainstream without radical new inventions. Carasso’s success is a tribute to finding creative but very simple innovations that keep enhancing the product and cause leaps forward in popularity. Adding jam to yogurt doesn’t require scientific genius or grand statements about disruptive technologies, but it was game-changing for yogurt anyway.
For instance, the same thing happened with the growers’ cooperative marketing cranberry juice under the Ocean Spray name. For years, the tiny tart berry grown in New England bogs was an acquired taste for a small niche market. Ocean Spray’s Dannon-like breakthrough was the creation of blended juices to add sweetness and pizzazz – cranraspberry, cranapple, crangrape, cranpeach. (They tried cranprune, but that didn’t work, as many of us would have predicted.) Successful companies are open to creative partnerships to add something from outside the core to enlarge a product’s appeal.
Contrast Carasso’s long-term dedication to yogurt with the way many businesses have been conceived in recent years — as empty vessels for making money rather than enduring contributions to well-being. Before the recession, the world moved so fast that tech products could become obsolete in months, if not minutes. Before the recession, some entrepreneurs dreamed less of their product and more about cashing out. During the recession, some entrepreneurs are undoubtedly thinking about giving up rather than selling even harder.
Daniel Carasso lived though a century’s worth of turbulence and destructive change, some of it much worse than anything happening today. He persisted when others gave up, reached out to partners to help him implement his vision, remained true to his values, and never lost his passion for yogurt. Maybe it wasn’t consuming his product himself that gave him a long life; maybe it was enduring confidence and belief in his product. Doing what one cares about — as a force for good in the world — is the real prescription for personal longevity.
Innovative Ways to Reel in Cash
As the credit crunch makes raising financing more difficult, small business owners are finding innovative ways to reel in extra cash.
Just ask day-spa owner Eva Sztupka-Kerschbaumer, who says she recently raised $30,000 in a single day. Her Pittsburgh,-Pa. spa, ESSpa Kozmetika Organic SkinCare, needed a quick cash infusion when a $12,000 microdermabrasion machine and two $1,000 facial steamers conked out in April. However, the last thing she wanted to accrue was interest charges, so she didn’t go to a bank to raise funds. And to avoid missing out on future profits, she also didn’t tap a factoring company, which provides cash up front in return for a cut of her company’s future receipts.
Here are four other ways to raise (and save) cash quickly:
- Offer upfront pricing
- Discount items, sometimes
- Consider purchase money financing
- Switch from fixed to variable costs
Free car charging at new, green(er) McDonald’s
The new restaurant in Cary—opening this week—will be North Carolina’s first “green” McDonald’s, and it aims to become gold-certified under the LEED standard. Both the interior and exterior of the restaurant have been designed with sustainability in mind. More than 95 percent of the wood used in construction, for example, comes from forests certified by the Forest Stewardship Council, while tables and decor incorporate rapidly renewable materials such as sunflower seed board, wheat board, bamboo and kirei board. Solatubes inside provide quality natural light, while lighting fixtures automatically adjust to changing light conditions. All components used inside are free of urea and formaldehyde, while vinyl is PVC-free and all paints, adhesives, coatings and sealants are low-VOC. The kitchen and bathrooms, meanwhile, are designed to minimize the use of water.
Perhaps most interesting of all, there will be preferred parking spaces for hybrid and fuel-efficient vehicles, along with ChargePoint stations offering free electricity for plug-in cars. Two such stations will be available at the restaurant’s launch, according to The News & Observer.
It’s not entirely clear whether a 30-minute meal offers enough time to charge a vehicle adequately, as HybridCars points out. Nevertheless, plans are afoot to install charging stations at McDonald’s locations in Sweden as well, the publication reported, and there seems little doubt that as adoption of electric vehicles increases, there will be demand for charging stations in convenient spots around the globe. Embrace such technology early, and you boost your eco-credentials; offer it as a free perk, and you could win eco-minded consumers’ hearts, minds and dollars!
Frustrated Sign
How to Clean Your Keyboard
Use an air compressor
Get rid of the mysterious sticky stuff under your keyboard with compressed air equipped with an extension nozzle. Turn the can at a 45-degree angle and spray between the keys. Tap and shake the keyboard and then repeat spraying. Finish by cleaning the piled up grime with a damp cloth.
Use a USB vacuum cleaner
USB vacuum cleaners to do the hard part of sucking up potato chip and pretzel debris. Just plug into your USB port and use the thin keyboard tool to make your keyboard look like new again. Also includes a built in LED light. (MSRP $10)
Use CyberClean
CyberClean makes cleaning fun! Just take the yellow gel blob that looks like Play-Doh and press it over the keys to lift out dirt and bacteria. The patented sticky formula from Switzerland even kills germs on contact. It’s also good on cell phones and any other potentially infectious surface. (MSRP $11)
Use the dishwasher
Yes, it does sound extreme, but it works if you want to save time and don’t need your keyboard for a few days. Wash the keyboard using only water and remember to remove all of keys. Then let it dry out for two or three days.
Personalized Customer Service with CRM Software
We recently launched a website at which people can recycle electronics. So far, we have been contacting our customers individually by e-mail. How can we keep up that level of service as more people visit the site?
As companies add customers, they run the risk of becoming like the Dr. Seuss character Mrs. McCave, who “had 23 sons and she named them all Dave.” What bugs people more than not getting a personalized shout-out with every communication is having their individuality ignored.
Start out with a personal touch by posting a statement on your website about your commitment to customer service, advises Jack Mitchell, author of Hug Your Customers and CEO of Mitchells/Richards/Marshs, a high-end clothing retailer with headquarters in Westport, Connecticut. Include your photo and signature so site visitors know a real human stands behind that commitment.
Make sure all specific questions receive specific answers — though there’s no need to construct a fresh response every time. If you document FAQs in an internal wiki, sometimes sending a personal response is as easy as copying and pasting. In fact, cold, faceless technology is often key to providing warm, caring service. “We’ve architected our whole IT system around personal relationships,” Mitchell says. His business uses customer relationship management software to track clients’ tastes, including their favorite designers and whether they prefer Pepsi or Coke served to them in the stores. Salesclerks draw on those data to make each returning client feel as welcome as a regular.
Part of being personable is being accessible, so create more ways for customers to express their love (or hate or indifference). John & Kira’s, a Philadelphia chocolatier, includes a survey at the end of its online checkout process. The company also has a blog and accounts on Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr. Founder John Doyle says those sites are a trove of suggestions.
Technology, however, cannot be all things to all people — particularly to ticked-off people. Customer complaints deserve responses from human beings. As Web traffic increases, it may not be feasible to field every inquiry yourself. But you can try.
White House Eyes Bailout Funds to Aid Small Firms
The Obama administration is developing an initiative to take money from the $700 billion rescue program for the banking system and make it available to millions of small businesses, which officials say are essential to any economic recovery because they employ so many people, according to sources familiar with the plan.
The effort would represent a striking shift from the rescue program’s original mandate, since it would direct billions of bailout dollars toward a plan that aims more at saving jobs than at righting the financial system. Some economists estimate that small businesses, defined as firms with fewer than 500 workers, employ most of the country’s workforce.
A proposal being floated by senior Treasury Department officials calls for using the bailout funds to expand a government program that helps small companies borrow from banks at low rates to keep their businesses going, the sources said. These “working-capital” loans would come with few restrictions and could be used to buy inventory, hold on to employees and pay off short-term debt.
The initiative would bulk up the Small Business Administration’s most popular lending program, called 7(a). Lines of credit for small companies could greatly increase in size. If a firm failed despite receiving this help, the government would cover most of the losses on the federal loan, perhaps as much as 90 percent. Lines of credit act like the credit cards for companies — short-term, revolving debt used to pay a variety of immediate expenses.
