Singular Focused Innovation

This week Proctor & Gamble sold off 43 beauty brands to Coty for 12.5 billion. This comes on the heels of them disposing of their pet and soap brands as well as Duracell batteries earlier this year.

GE made a similar move divesting of all of its financial services assets a few months back, leaving just their industrial focused business engines in place to power the behemoth forward.

What’s with all the dumping of assets by two of the world’s leading companies? It’s certainly not about financial failings, but rather about one of the key driving forces of the sharing economy and world of we, singular focus.

When Steve Jobs helped pioneer the age of total experience management we are living in today, not only did he flip the script on the age of total quality management that came before it, he also changed the game in the realm of niche focus. The new Apple went against the GE prevailing notion of doing as many things well as possible, to being driven by the idea of being the best in the world at one thing and one thing only.

In Steve’s world, doing one thing and doing that one thing better than anyone else, was the guiding mantra, and the key to much of Apple’s second act success. For example, Jonny Ives had a laser focus on design only, which is probably why the elegant white ear buds he invented for the iPod not only helped ushered in a new era of fortune for Apple, but also helped launch the 8.5 billion headphone industry of today and the audio Renaissance that is upon us.

This is the reason GE shed its financially focused skin to go back to “its industrial core” as Jeff Immelt put it and likely why AG Lafley has decided to focus P&G on a portfolio of just 65 consumer focused household brands, all sharing a common thread and focus, to drive the company’s growth in the future.

If you look at the companies driving our new world forward you will see the very same niche focus driving their success. Uber does just transportation, Postmates does just on demand delivery, Fancy Hands does just all things administrative, Handy just does all things home repair and so on.

In the sharing economy, brand experience is critical and in order to not just succeed but lead, a singular and niche focus on innovation is the must have strategic imperative, and it’s clearly not just a guiding mantra for startups any more.

Billee Howard is Founder + Chief Engagement Officer of Brandthropologie, a cutting edge communications consulting firm specializing in helping organizations and individuals to produce innovative, creative and passionate dialogues with target communities, consumers and employees, while blazing a trail toward new models of artful, responsible, and sustainable business success. Billee is a veteran communications executive in brand development, trend forecasting, strategic media relations, and C-suite executive positioning. She has a book dedicated to the study of the sharing economy called WeCommerce due out in Fall 2015 as well as a blog entitled the #HouseofWe dedicated to curating the trends driving our economy forward. You can read more about “WE-Commerce: How to Create, Collaborate, and Succeed in the Sharing Economy” right here!