Even if your product is defined and looks a certain way, things can change dramatically when you look at the tea leaves.
Wrigley
Wrigley didn’t always sell gum. In fact, William Wrigley Jr. stumbled on the value of gum while giving it away for free. 19-year-old Mr. Wrigley Jr. moved to Chicago in 1891, and with $32 in his pocket, he started selling soap and baking powder. To attract more attention to his premium baking powder product, he began including free chewing gum. The gum proved to be more popular than his actual product. Wrigley went on to manufacture his own chewing gum brands, including Juicy Fruit, Spearmint, and Doublemint. In 2008, Mars acquired Wrigley’s for $23 billion. Today, Wrigleys is one of the most recognizable brands in American history.
Avon
With annual revenues exceeding $5.5 billion, Avon is the fifth-largest beauty company and, with 6.4 million representatives, is the second-largest direct-selling enterprise in the world. In the 1880s, David H. McConnell was a traveling book salesman, but he realized that his female customers were more interested in the free samples of perfume that came with the books than the books themselves. He began recruiting women to sell the perfume product that he manufactured himself, believing they would be able to relate and sell to one another better than male salesmen.