Wedgwood's Success: Innovation and Creativity

When Wedgwood started his business, pottery industry is already established, comprises many small players around the country. He started with a small production facility, incorporated his experience from working in family business and many years in the industry. His passion and innovative ideas helped him expand his business and grew to become a big player in potter industry. Wedgwood was a differentiator company, specifically a late mover in the industry. Wedgwood gained competitive advantages through innovation, creativity, and strong marketing strategies. Innovation and creativity were the key to Wedgwood success, including the invention of creamware and white pottery. Josiah focused on bringing new ideas to the design of his products, finding new raw materials to help producing better products, and building/creating machines with latest technology to help with efficiency and uniformity. His wife specialized in pottery design and coloring which help their products differentiate from other plain pottery products in the market. Moreover, the sustained competitive advantage Wedgwood had, was the result of good marketing strategies with help from Josiah's partner, Bentley. Base on the reading, marketing strategies Wedgwood used were establishing showroom, inertia selling strategy, and promotion through high class people (Queen). Wedgwood was also the first one in the industry have brand name on every products. Wedgwood were so successful in England until its number of productions exceed the number of sale which cause the company to stock up a very high inventory. This opportunity caused Wedgwood to expand internationally to many countries in Europe and China. Wedgwood leverage its competitive advantage through demand side scope economy. Firstly, company needed new outlet for products that overproduced for local market. The example from class discussion would be Coke case. Coke and Pepsi competed with each other until the market were fully saturated, then Coke