Friday July 10, 2009
By Rosabeth Moss Kanter
I offer you the path to the best product testimonial you could ever have, but you might have to wait a lifetime to get it.
Daniel Carasso, former head and still honorary chairman of Groupe Danone, died peacefully in his Paris home in May at the ripe old age of 103. This longevity is a tribute to a lifetime of yogurt.
If you create products that you believe in passionately as a force for good — in this case generating health and well-being — you too can live to 103 and build a global empire!
The story began in Spain. Carasso's father, Isaac, a physician, migrated from Thessaloniki, Greece, to Barcelona and started a business in 1919 to sell yogurt in Spain using cultures from the prestigious Pasteur Institute. He named the yogurt Danone after son Daniel's nickname. Throughout its early years Danone yogurt was marketed as a health food and sold by prescription through pharmacies. In 1929, Daniel Carasso, having studied business and bacteriology, established the Danone brand in France.
Carasso and his company survived the Great Depression, World War II, post-war recessions, mergers and acquisitions, and changing consumer lifestyles to transform yogurt from an obscure ethnic food to a worldwide sensation. His story holds inspiring lessons about the healthiest ingredients in business: innovation, collaboration, and long-term commitment.
Along the way, Carasso remained dedicated to yogurt no matter what happened. He ignored the beginning of the Great Depression because he was too busy trying to find dairy stores for his product in France, as the New York Times reported. After fleeing the Nazis in 1941, he found U.S. partners with whom he created the American version, under the name Dannon. Yogurt rose from obscurity and niche markets into the mass consumer mainstream when adding fruit jam to the sour product proved a marketing breakthrough. The American Dannon was sold to Beatrice Foods, and Carasso returned to Europe after World War II to grow Danone into a global brand, merging several times along the way to form Groupe Danone in 1973. In 2008, the Groupe had worldwide sales of $20.48 billion.
Carasso's success involved a lifetime of innovation, yet the innovations were often very simple. Enhancements to make a product more user-friendly can quickly propel something from the margins to the mainstream without radical new inventions. Carasso's success is a tribute to finding creative but very simple innovations that keep enhancing the product and cause leaps forward in popularity. Adding jam to yogurt doesn't require scientific genius or grand statements about disruptive technologies, but it was game-changing for yogurt anyway.
For instance, the same thing happened with the growers' cooperative marketing cranberry juice under the Ocean Spray name. For years, the tiny tart berry grown in New England bogs was an acquired taste for a small niche market. Ocean Spray's Dannon-like breakthrough was the creation of blended juices to add sweetness and pizzazz - cranraspberry, cranapple, crangrape, cranpeach. (They tried cranprune, but that didn't work, as many of us would have predicted.) Successful companies are open to creative partnerships to add something from outside the core to enlarge a product's appeal.
Contrast Carasso's long-term dedication to yogurt with the way many businesses have been conceived in recent years — as empty vessels for making money rather than enduring contributions to well-being. Before the recession, the world moved so fast that tech products could become obsolete in months, if not minutes. Before the recession, some entrepreneurs dreamed less of their product and more about cashing out. During the recession, some entrepreneurs are undoubtedly thinking about giving up rather than selling even harder.
Daniel Carasso lived though a century's worth of turbulence and destructive change, some of it much worse than anything happening today. He persisted when others gave up, reached out to partners to help him implement his vision, remained true to his values, and never lost his passion for yogurt. Maybe it wasn't consuming his product himself that gave him a long life; maybe it was enduring confidence and belief in his product. Doing what one cares about — as a force for good in the world — is the real prescription for personal longevity.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/harvardbusiness?sid=H14fd0b92e8da5946e5a56d03e49135db
