Analysis of Gillette
Here's a great article by David Vinjamuri, former Brand Manager at Johnson & Johnson and Coca-Cola, covering Gillette, the new Fusion razor, the razor market. The main point of this article is that Gillette is a monopoly and has no real competition. While I'm not sure I agree with that premise, the author does bring up several good points.
1) Gillette does not make the methodology of their shaving studies known, so when they claim that most men prefer the new Fusion two-to-one over the Mach3, we don't know how they arrived at these numbers. It seems unlikely that scientific double-blind techniques were used, and when presented with a new product people tend to like it implicitly.
2) The Procter and Gamble acquistion of Gillette was probably helped by the upcoming release of the Fusion. As the author points out, launching a new brand is generally quite risky, but Gillette is in a unique position to attain huge success given its track record with the Mach3.
I don't necessarily agree with the author's assessment of the market landscape however. According to this St. Louis Business Journal article sales of Schick Quattro were $26.9 million verses sales of Mach3 which were $28.3 million for the same 12 month period ending in November of 2004. That doesn't seem like a Gillette domination, but it doesn't account for razors sold under different brand names.
Anyway, click on over and form your own opinions. Thanks Lukas for sending this article in! Great read.
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Posted by Russell Neufeld at September 28, 2005 9:37 AM
umm... the article says that the 28.3 is for the M3Power brand from Gilette, in terms of new razors (i.e. handles). When you look at the number of M3 brands out there, as well as the fact that they were comparing the only Quattro name with just the newest M3Power brand from Gillette, you can see how it turns into domination.
Gillette has so many brands (M3, M3Turbo, M3Champion, M3Power, Venus, Venus Vibrance, etc) that taken together they sweep the field.
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