Those of you that have watched some of my older videos will know that I like digging around in the Basin to Nilsson House looking at branch-shared data from 1949. And if you've watched the others, you'll know the top three breakfast cereal brands of 60 years ago are still household names today. You'll also know the best selling shampoo brands of 1949 had all but disappeared by 1979. But what I didn't tell you about was the third book I looked at and that to me that was the most interesting. So third book I looked at was Laundry Detergence. Now what were the big three Laundry Detergence of 1949? They were Rinceau, Oxidol and Purcell. They had about a third of the market each, a third, a third, a third, a third. Who could possibly have said in 1949 that two of those brands would disappear off the face of the earth while the other would go on to one of the most successful brands on the planet. There of course lots of reasons why this happened but for me the main thing that happened was Proctering Gamble because PNG introduced a synthetic washing powder to replace the old fashioned soap-based powders. Nice synthetic powder was not only cheaper, it actually washed your clothes better. And so brands like Tide and Ariel cleaned up if you excuse the pun. Now Purcell switched from soap to a synthetic formulation whereas Rinceau and Oxidol measured their increasingly impressive and increasingly irrelevant share of the dying soap market. In fact Nielsen measured their share of the dying soap market all the way to their extinction. Now I think that's fascinating and at this point I'd like to introduce you to the concept of creative destruction. This was a phrase that was coined by the Czech economist Joseph Schumpeter in which he said that whenever there's a major change the old guard are usually unable to adapt and are swept aside by the new order. He was talking about politics but also about technology and it's particularly true in consumer goods. Once you've got this concept of creative destruction in your mind suddenly you start seeing it everywhere. For another example PNG is gang, he's toothpaste. So historically toothpaste has been cosmetic. It was about making your teeth whiter, your breath fresher. But it was PNG that introduced the concept of fluoride and so created the idea that toothpaste could actually fight the decay in your mouth and the brand Crest was launched with the support of the dental association. Then the market changed. In fact it split between those offering a ring of protection and fighting decay and those that continue to offer only whitening and Colgate of course is what happened. There are loads of examples almost any category you look at. So back to fruit juice, Dumonté did not take the opportunity of new technology and move their brand into the chiller cabinet. Tropicana did. At the time Dumonté had 60% share of the fruit juice market and now you can hardly find it. Instant coffee was invented in the 1930s as a result of the depression but it wasn't lions who had a coffee house in every corner that introduced instant coffee. This new technology was taken by an unheard of brand called Ness Cafe. When the market moved from watching your dishes by hand to using a dishwasher it wasn't fairing the big dish washing brand of the 1970s but a completely new brand finish that led the dishwasher market. Fairier fighting back now but it's a long time after the fact and after finish had taken the market. Why is it listery to not Colgate that cornered the mouthwash market? Why is it Carex and Radox and not Lifeboy and Lapps and Imperial leather that won the day in liquid soap? Of course in every case the circumstances are important and the branding is important but overall when you look at it whenever there's a little bit of new technology the old guard struttle to adapt. It's very much still happening today. Look at the internet. A major technological breakthrough and yet how many of the big internet sites had a significant bricks and mortar presence prior to the internet? Not Google, not YouTube, not eBay, not Wikipedia. Why did W8 Smith not see the opportunity to become Amazon? The internet didn't take W8 Smith by surprise. Everybody at W8 Smith would have seen it coming. Everybody at W8 Smith would have recognised the opportunity to sell their books and other things online. The truth is it's far easier to see the big trends and much much harder to adapt your business to meet those trends. There's also a tendency to think that the big technological breakthroughs are behind us, particularly if you're working in a fairly stable category but they're not. They're happening all the time. The laundry market continues to evolve. I don't know about you but I think it's highly unlikely that we'll still wash our clothes in the same way we do today, 20 years, even 10 years from now. In this world of climate change it seems archaic that we wash our clothes by throwing them into a machine, filling it with water, filling it with poisonous chemicals and churning it around at great expense for an hour. And already there are scientists and development teams all over the world developing alternative ways to wash our clothes. As of Singapore they developed a product called Airwaves. I don't really understand how it works but it's a machine that washes our clothes using air and not water. Whatever technology comes to the forefront it's certain that there'll be a host of consumer products to support that new technology and to me it'll be fascinating to see if personal or bold or aerial are able to adapt to meet that change whether in fact a whole new generation of brands will emerge.