Can one product fit all markets?

A fluorescent light fitting - now a luminaire.

You might have thought that one product could suit all markets, or be made to suit all markets. After all a light fitting was in essence a relatively simple product. Like most companies in the UK at the beginning of the 1970s our products had been developed with the British market foremost in our considerations.  But before going down that route lets think about the market influences at that time.

In 1973, Britain, along with Ireland and Denmark was about to join the Common Market, with its six existing members of France, Italy, Germany, Belgium, The Netherlands and Luxembourg. As a Product Manager, my brief was to specify new products taking input from the UK  sales team, obligatory  design features to meet legislation, to figure out the price and unit cost, tooling investment  etc and then steer the product through all the essential design to production stages then on to building stocks and getting  them selling. Sales were mainly to national electrical wholesaler chains.Wholesalers bought at a discounted price from the manufacturer, then sold on to electrical installers at a further discount. So the business model was the manufacturer usually held a national buffer stock, distributed  the goods to wholesalers, who in turn held stock and sold over the trade counter to the contractor. Pricing structures were retail trade price or net trade price with discounts talked about as '20 and 5' or '40 and 10'. Keeping the supply chain full of stock was the prime aim. The brand leading lighting fittings sold in tens and hundreds of thousands, even millions, so there was a huge manufacturing investment in production lines allowing us to be the lowest cost producer.

So what effect did the Common Market have? We were set up to be the lowest cost producers in the most commonly used products, always have stock, promote the product with incentives for the wholesalers to stock and electricians to buy and install - a business model that saw volume grow year on year. But the Common Market knocked all this on the head. For the same generic fitting, which by the way we now had to call a luminaire, the supply voltage was 220volt (on a good day) not 240 volt, electrical connections were different, lamp caps were different, electric plugs and sockets were different and building module sizes were different. But what was really interesting was that there were differences from one Common Market country to the next! Oh yes! Britain had gone metric in anticipation of this happy day when we became European, but large parts of this same Europe expressed dimensions in metres and centimetres but  used the internationally standardised BSP for screw threads. So when at the behest of the Common Market, screw threads were changed to the shiny new metric sizes we phased out the one inch BSP etc and phased in 25mm threads instead. Then the complaints started to arrive from all over Europe that your light fittings (sorry luminaries) don't fit our conduit anymore. It then emerged that not everyone had signed up to be metric in Europe, they stayed with the international standard of BSP! And what does BSP  stand for? Why, British Standard Pipe of course whose origin may have been in the age of gaslight.

But this was just the first step in encumbering manufacturing industry with unnecessary and unwanted additional costs which ended with manufacture moving off shore to China.


As Britain votes to stay in the European Union or leave, this blog will run a seri es of articles on some of there practical experiences of business in the EU.