Alternate Title: Is your organization in love with the right projects?

Sarah Fitzharding is brilliant.  She has a PhD from Cambridge and has had fellowships at Yale and Harvard. She has an absolutely enchanting English accent and a way of framing the context for her remarks so you immediately want to agree with her, and make sure that everyone around you agrees with her as well. She was J. Walter Thompson’s planner on my Zantac business and I relished every meeting, focus group and phone call. I was smitten. Then I found out that she was in a committed relationship with a woman who was a respected poetry editor. While that should have been that, I still regularly paused to daydream about what life would be like for us.  Sitting around a lovely fire , kids and dogs at our feet, laughing and talking about high-minded concepts. You know,  just “getting” each other. The problem wasn’t having a crush on Sarah; it was continuing to daydream about our future  together after I knew that it was never going to happen.

I never would have met Sarah had I not suffered through an incredibly challenging assignment as the Brand Manager on Listerine Toothpaste (Listerine has a toothpaste?) about two years after it was launched unsuccessfully.

Listerine Mouthwash was on a roll in the mid 1990s. After over 100 years as a single flavor, Cool Mint Listerine had been successfully launched and the brand finally moved out of glass bottles into plastic ones. That made manufacturing, shipping and merchandising much easier and less expensive. The brand was gaining share period after period.  Colgate, however, posed a significant threat to Listerine with a new germ killing technology, Triclosan/Gantrez that they were advancing through the FDA. If approved, Colgate planned to launch both a toothpaste and mouth rinse under the Colgate Total name.

This was a major threat to the Listerine business.  Colgate was the # 2 US toothpaste brand at the time with 3X -4X the total number of households of Listerine. Surely, consumers who currently used both Colgate and Listerine would switch to Total and stop using Listerine as often or maybe even stop all together. There was no question that the brand needed to defend the Listerine franchise. The tactic was to launch a Cool Mint Listerine toothpaste that combined cavity fighting with plaque and gingivitis claims before Colgate Total could get a foothold (Total required a longer regulatory pathway where as Listerine ingredients were already approved through the FDA Monograph process).

The original goal was to launch both “regular” and tartar control varieties in 2 sizes. This was an important part of the launch because without enough shelf space to stand out, the brand would not achieve sufficient velocity.  The business case seemed simple, Listerine only needed to source consumers who already used the mouth rinse to approach 8%-10% market share. With premium pricing, they could help the retailers make a profit in toothpaste, a notoriously low margin category.

Things started to go wrong quickly. The base formulation with the unique claims had major issues so the team decided to move forward but to replace it with a Listerine “flavored product” that could only make the same claims as existing toothpaste. Similarly, the tartar control formula was delayed so the brand decided to launch with only two facings.  A “me-too” tartar control product was launched after the regular formula. A premium priced, un-differentiated product with a fraction of the marketing support of the Colgate and P+G brands was not a commercial blockbuster. I believe share peaked at about 2.2% and when I became the Brand Manager about 2 years after it had launched, the direction from the Category VP was clear: Clean it up, stop losing money, stabilize, stabilize, stabilize.

The next 15 months were ugly. There was a different account threatening to delist us everyday. Our returns and product expirations were through the roof but we slowly stopped the bleeding. With the help of a wildly dedicated team we got the business under control.  We even created a small regional radio and outdoor ad campaign. I’m not sure it drove consumption, but it kept us in distribution and lifted team morale. In return for these efforts I rotated on to Zantac (a big brand with real A+P budgets), where I was promoted to Sr. Brand Manager and got to work with Sarah.

The time I wasted daydreaming and the millions of dollars and hundreds of FTEs that Warner-Lambert wasted on the toothpaste initiative have a remarkably similar foundation. Both abandoned their initial objective in favor of a single solution then ignored the obvious red flags that should have stopped the project.

Listerine Toothpaste is not unique. It is also not the most dramatic example of resources set adrift.  When he arrived as President of Bausch+ Lomb Vision Care in 2008, Pete Valenti found 23 different lens material development projects going on without distinct objectives and action standards. It wasn’t until Pete and his head of R&D George Grobe (who had recently returned to B+L) killed most of them that the organization could really focus and ultimately develop Bausch + Lomb Ultra, a line of contact lenses that restored share growth to B+L’s monthly contact lens business.

We see this issue so frequently with our clients that the New England Consulting Group has developed very sensitive tools for identifying the projects that have migrated well past their objective. One of our tools (and I can’t believe I am giving it away here) uses a special technology called asking questions. We ask such probing questions as: “Why are you doing that?” or “What do you hope to achieve with this initiative?” or “If the CEO told you tomorrow that you were 100% in charge of this brand and you had to grow it, would you be doing this project?” It is remarkable how often these simple questions reveal the compromises and changes that turn a smart project into folly.  Kidding aside, we actually have a product that we developed over several years to re-examine plans, strategies and initiatives, in part, to bring them back to the objectives our  clients need to meet to  win in the marketplace. This product is so popular it accounts for about one-third of our engagements.

Here are some common best practices to help avoid losing sight of your objectives:

•  Write a very clear statement of your objective and an even clearer definition of why the project meets the objective and the conditions that must be met to keep meeting the action standards and moving forward
•  Have clear stakeholder reviews/gates that the project has to go through
• Make everyone read the statement created in point 1 and align that the project still meets the objective before any other discussion of go/no go occurs.
• Get individual opinions and votes not group opinions/votes, make each stakeholder go on the record

Don’t limit possibility. Find the place where possible and probable can hold hands, then make sure they never lose their grip.

Today, Listerine is a thriving brand with sales exceeding $1B. I have been happily married for nearly 14 years. Sarah and I are FB friends. All is well.