Last week, Lululemon founder Chip Wilson took out a full-page ad in The Wall Street Journal and let rip. His critique cut through the familiar boardroom haze, painting his former brand’s decline with the vivid urgency of a plane crash.
His words carried particular scorn for the board’s governance, faulting them for “systematically dismantling the business model” and losing key creative talent, as well as the institutional knowledge that made Lululemon great.
The financial data backs him up: Lululemon shares have plunged more than 50% over the past year.
At the heart of Wilson’s critique–and the top of his list of fixes–are words often forgotten as growth and corporate gentrification take hold: product, brand, entrepreneurial, and creative.
Each is essential to success. Each is gradually threatened as a business grows and forgets the very things that made it grow in the first place.
Wilson calls this process “GAP-ivization.” It’s a terrible word for an acute observation. Corporate America is great at short-term, conservative growth, but entirely useless at maintaining the fire that built a company’s early success.
Let’s review each word in turn and remind ourselves what is required.
Brand
To build a brand like Chip Wilson did, you must embrace differentiation. Not the McKinsey version with bland charts and value curves. The prehistoric version. The massive, flashing risks that follow a different path and create something unlike everything else.
There is no such thing as “brands” in general. That would be an oxymoron. There is just “The Brand:” capital “B,” no plural “s.” When Lululemon launched, it was not like anything else. When you have that degree of differentiation, consumers become price insensitive and brands grow.
Maintaining difference is crucial—but tricky. Growth is a potent enemy here. It brings copying competition, adds layers to the corporate hierarchy, attracts generic people with generic thinking.
Before you know it, you are the boring center of the category, and everyone else has moved on. GAP, in other words.
Product
When the Four Ps were invented 60 years ago by the late Professor Jerry McCarthy, marketers had a clear manual for their field’s tactical levers. But a succession of marketing blockheads spent years suggesting other words—all astonishingly, starting with P—to replace the existing four.
In any other discipline, 60 years confers permanence; only in marketing does it signal the need for replacement.