Keeping the Traditional Current
Investment education site, The Motley Fool, has posted an insightful profile of house-care products producer, Clorox. The author recommends Clorox as a value stock to purchase following a slump in earnings. What’s interesting, however, is his rational for selecting a company that wouldn’t normally be on the radar of active investors, with its relatively flat stock movement.
He goes on to applaud Clorox for the company’s ability to innovate and keep up with social media, despite being such a large, traditional organization (they have been around nearly 100 years). And despite being a producer of such uninspiring products as toilet bowl cleaner, bleach, trash bags and mops.
The brand is approaching 200 thousand Facebook fans—an active community that chats about housecleaning yes, but also about charitable causes and party planning. Much of the content is pulled from Clorox’s “Mom Blog” which shares engaging, personal accounts of the life of a regular mom.
While rival P&G gets most of the attention for its open innovation efforts, the author points out that innovation is an active part of the Clorox culture. The company partnered with P&G on an open innovation project back in 2002, well before many other peers were jumping on the bandwagon—especially jumping into such a partnership with a rival. Clorox has also embraced crowdsourcing— making it a group effort led not only by employees, but suppliers and consumers through its crowdsourcing initiative, Clorox Connects.
This should be an inspiring piece for any organization that is hesitant to use new strategies for fear of rocking the boat at a place that is too old, too traditional or too boring. If bleach and mops can generate Facebook fans and a trash bags produce open innovation partnerships, so should just about any other product or service.
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