Category Leading TSR through Innovation at Church & Dwight
Michael Eknoian, PhD and Bryan A. Harpine, Church & Dwight
Originally presented: October 1, 2020
Watch time: 57 minutes
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2020 Outstanding Corporate Innovator award winner Church & Dwight has recently completed a remarkable decade-long run of 20% annual Total Shareholder Return. This easily leads the Consumer Package Goods industry, and bests the S&P by 3x during the same time period. Given that 50% of their organic growth comes from new products, innovation is clearly a key driver in their on-going business success.
In this webinar, Church & Dwight will share their best practices for sustaining a culture of innovation while competing against much larger players in mature categories. Specifically, Church & Dwight created an unprecedented premium tier in the commodity cat litter market, anchored by their Clump & Seal family of brands. Similarly, they grew their Fabric Care business 2x the industry average leveraging breakthrough odor control technologies. This is a company that makes it a priority to understand the equity of its Brands, and supercharging them for growth regardless of whether they are longstanding company brands or more recent acquisitions.
Church & Dwight has many innovation best practices that will be of high interest to the PDMA audience across multiple industries, including the use of “Drill Sites” for the Front End of Innovation, an acquire-and-leverage approach to accelerating business growth in mature categories, on-line consumer research and early market testing, and their FutureWorks and SPRINT processes for assessing the potential of new product platforms.
Join us as we celebrate Church & Dwight’s OCI award, and take advantage of the unique opportunity to 'look under the hood' of a proven corporate innovator. You’ll be sure to discover best practices for driving innovation success within your own organization.
About the Presenters
Mike Eknoian, PhD leads the Product Development R&D organization for Fabric Care and Home Care at Church & Dwight. His focus is on delivering high value product pipelines for the company by driving product development, upstream innovation, packaging, pipeline strategy, and strategic supplier relationships. He has been at Church & Dwight for almost 3 yrs.
Prior to joining Church & Dwight, Mike had 15 yrs experience at Johnson & Johnson Consumer Products innovating on various global brands. In his last role at J&J Mike led the Open Innovation organization that drove significant growth and the process for setting clear targets based on consumer insights and faster decision making; Partner-Enabled Development for local/regional brands as well as low-complexity initiatives globally.
During Bryan A. Harpine’s business career he has created extraordinary growth on America’s favorite brands such as Arm & Hammer, Sunkist, Lipton, and Oxi-Clean. In doing so, Bryan played a key role for two of the most admired companies in corporate America, Unilever (Lipton) and Church & Dwight Co., Inc. While at Unilever Bryan launched the Sunkist franchise into orange juice and kids snacks categories. While at Church & Dwight he helped expand the Arm & Hammer franchise from $135 million selling products in just 3 categories to $1.2B selling products in over 50 categories. He created and launched Arm & Hammer’s famous Fridge’n Freezer Freshener which transformed how millions of consumers keep their foods fresh from the grocery store to the kitchen table. Bryan has taken the Arm & Hammer pet franchise from $60 million to over $500 million and in doing so has won Nielsen’s Breakthrough Innovation Award two times, which identifies the top 25 new products among the nation’s 3,000 new products launched in any given year in the US. Bryan and his wife enjoy international travel to some of the earth’s most remote places and he enjoys playing golf competitively.