Freedom, Inc.
Free Your Employees and Let Them Lead Your Business to Higher Productivity, Profits, and Growth
1
"HOW" COMPANIES AND "WHY" COMPANIES
How Not to Run a Business
Even If You don't know what Gore-Tex is, you know what it does: It keeps you dry--guaranteed. As a brand, Gore-Tex has been so successful that it sometimes seems in danger of disappearing, of becoming a generic term like "Band-Aid." Since it was invented in 1971, Gore-Tex has given rise to a number of competing products. Some of those boast properties said to be superior to the original. But if you walk into a store and want to know whether a ski jacket is waterproof, the question you'll probably ask is "Is it Gore-Tex?"
It's the kind of brand dominance--over both market share and "mind share"--that marketers dream of, or lose sleep over. The story of how it came to be, and came to symbolize an entire market category, is the story of two radical ideas.
Bill and Genevieve Gore's first idea was that there were market opportunities for a chemical called polytetrafluorethylene--PTFE for short--that DuPont wasn't pursuing.
Today, PTFE is be ...
read full excerpt from: Freedom, Inc. ebook
