Comments

If P&G are doing it, it must be right.

See Lovemarks (Kevin Roberts)

Posted by Stuart Jones at January 28, 2005 7:32 AM

Wondering how you can wrap your brain around the staggering figure of $57 billion dollars? Then you'll enjoy reading about how I've figured out some relative measures of this amount of money: http://www.intuitive.com/blog/archives/000974.html

Posted by Dave Taylor at January 28, 2005 8:17 AM

Selfishly, Boston loses ANOTHER company, after Pru & Hancock, and, sorta, a football team. Charmin Stadium? Wipe & Watch the Patriots?

Posted by tom peters at January 28, 2005 9:01 AM

Wow, Proctor and Gamble Co. is buying Gillette for about $57 million. Cingular and AT&T merge earlier this month and now this. A few months ago, I read an interesting article on the cycles of business. It went something like this: Over the past decade technology, automation, and employee productivity has produced change, change in the focus on “How” businesses generate profit. In the beginning, firms focused on generating revenues, expanding into new products and offering new product lines. Saturation? Check out the “Death of Demand” by Tom Osenton on this one. Perhaps the “DotCom” mania was the last push in the push for revenue without profits. Then corporations turned to cost cutting, which as impacted us in the technology world as well as enabled by us. Cost cutting with outsourcing, overseas sourcing, and salary freezes are just a few examples. What does another mania mean? Maybe we have saturated the market with more products and services than we really need. Maybe with the help of Wal-Mart, we have driven all of the cost cutting initiatives that we can stand. Are mergers the last hope in getting the stock price and shareholder value up?

Posted by RTodd at January 28, 2005 9:11 AM

“I don’t believe in economies of scale. You don’t get better by being bigger. You get worse.” —Dick Kovacevich

Plus others, from Tom's CEO's are Idiots presentation

Posted by Matt at January 28, 2005 9:22 AM

Ther´s so few imagination when designing tools for men... The Venus razor is one example. If you see razor´s for men, 9 out of ten are black and roughly designed. It is as if roughness was a quality of masculinity.

Posted by felix gerena at January 28, 2005 9:49 AM

I dont believe in it. Most mergers go bad. Good brands dilude - see AOL/ Times Warner or Daimler buying Chrysler or ...

Customers are most likely to get annoyed (well, okay, it is a consumer brand, so may be here it works). Most companies only get good at cutting costs and laying off people - but still havent learnt to grow their business.

Is this a result of Wal-Mart and the way to fight back for better margins?

Posted by Andreas at January 28, 2005 10:19 AM

Lets not forget that SBC &ATT is in the pipline too !!
M&A seems to be in the upswing now.. for w/ever reasons.. I can't figure out..

Posted by /pd at January 28, 2005 10:39 AM

I think the Gillette brand will be weaker.

Whether it makes it easier for them both to deal with Wal-Mart is also another question (I'm assuming they think the answer is "yes").

One thing I do know about P&G, is that they're a damn fine company. They make toilet paper with more passion than most artists make paintings.

Posted by hugh macleod at January 28, 2005 10:57 AM

Is this a result of Wal-Mart and the way to fight back for better margins?
Yes

Posted by Gabriel Salcido at January 28, 2005 11:13 AM

Cast me as indifferent - wait - can't actually do that if I make the effort to post at all. If you buy up all your competition you stop listening to your customers. I gonna have to go with bad.

Posted by walter white at January 28, 2005 1:13 PM