One brand per channel: the 1991 identity change (1991)

What it means to read the sales floor in detail

What KOSÉ stepped away from was the commercial custom of the day: handing every sales floor the same goods. Put Cosme Decorté in department stores, Predia in specialty shops and mass retailers, Marie Claire in drugstores, and you need as many development programmes, advertising campaigns and inventories as you have names. That the company could commit to it in 1991 appears to be because in 1988 it had already separated its counselling-sales and general-goods companies — dividing the selling organization before dividing the products. The two answers Kobayashi Yasukiyo gave when asked what distinguished KOSÉ from Shiseido were exactly these: brand marketing, and group management.

But a method of raising a brand per channel is weak against the speed at which the channels themselves change places. Yasukiyo himself named inventory burden and the consolidation of inefficient brands as problems in 1999, and in the year to March 2006 the company sank to falling sales and profit because it was late adapting to the drugstores’ turn toward profitability. The more finely you read the sales floor, the heavier the rework when the party you read changes. A design that prevents price erosion and the speed to switch to a new channel were hard to hold together inside the same method.