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Nine Greatest Selling Innovations

Introduction

Putting the customer first is a modern day cliché. But many great businesses have
been successful by taking a different approach to markets and prospects. Sometimes
a person’s wish to live better makes them do something new (Edison Idea 4), some-
times it’s an off-the-wall change (Ann Summers Idea 6) that adds a whole new mar-
ket, or you can take what you are doing, make a small change and reap the rewards
(Vodafone Idea 8). But we start with an idea that does not create a product or a
market, it just listens to the customers and takes off.

Idea 1 – ‘Making it easy, and cheap, for customers
to buy’ (Sears)

In 1891 American farmers were grousing. No change there, then. This would have
been the non-story of the year had their grouse not been justified, and had Richard
Sears not listened to it.

The problem was the prices at the rural stores where country dwellers were
bound to shop. Using the example of the wholesale price of flour being half the
retail price charged to them in the shops, the farmers formed protest movements to
fight these high prices and the various middlemen whom they held responsible.

By chance – I wonder how many of the greatest ideas start from pure chance –
Sears, an agent of a railway company, had experimented with buying watches in
some numbers and selling them to agents further up the railway line. He had then
joined with Alvah Roebuck, a watchmaker, and founded a viable business.