From supermarkets and fluorescent lighting to hamburgers and sticky tape, the US has provided the richest source of lucrative, proved ideas for the smart British entrepreneur. The transatlantic flow will never stop. But success doesn't translate automatically.
You'll find few translations more encouraging, though, than baking soda toothpaste. After a week of advertising, sales in Tesco of the Arm & Hammer Dental Care brand, previously wholly unknown in Britain, had quadrupled. It's won an amazing 5% of this congested and highly competitive market - so competitive that rivals hastily added baking soda brands to their ranges.
They don't use the words 'baking soda', though, as Roger Parkyn gleefully notes. His business, Integrator, handled the launch last May and stuck deliberately to the unfamiliar American phrase for bicarbonate of soda. So the brand is still the only 'baking soda' toothpaste. That preserves one element of an asset which US imports need - a Unique Selling Proposition.
That's the starting point, says Parkyn. There has to be 'something in the intrinsic nature of the product' that will make it highly acceptable in Britain. Success in the US doesn't answer that requirement. A product can boom in one market and bomb in another. How can you tell in advance which will happen?
With Arm & Hammer, preliminary consumer research did the trick. Two-hour group discussions were followed by instant trials with brush and tube, which produced enthusiastic Ooh and Aah responses - duly picked up in the WOW advertising campaign. That has obviously been a wow: but Parkyn would be the last person to insist that advertising power is always decisive.
That's because his agency believes in integrating all the activities that can make a product succeed - public relations, sales promotion, design, advertising and direct marketing. Everybody in marketing knows that these activities work better for working together. But too few firms actually follow that logic in practice.
If you're competing in an established market like toothpaste, you advertise or die. But the brilliant product you spotted on holiday in Texas may have relatively small presence in Britain - like Pace Thick and Chunky Salsa, a pride of San Antonio and another of Parkyn's progeny. The issue is then whether the brand can transfer without advertising support.
Salsa (the hot and spicy Tex-Mex sauce) has overtaken ketchup sales in the US, and tacos, tortilla chips, etc. have been growing fast here. But research can be misleading with little-known products - as Gustave Leven, the man behind Perrier, found when crossing the Atlantic in the opposite direction.
The research showed miserably small demand. But Leven followed his own instinct, reasoning that New York tap water tasted awful - and Perrier tasted better. The subsequent smash hit rested initially on word of mouth and public relations, which is precisely the recipe Parkyn has used successfully with Pace. Sampling and PR have generated a 20% market share.
The task might seem even harder with Snyder's Pretzel Pieces, famous in the US (especially in their home town of Hanover, Pennsylvania), but meaningless in Britain. Parkyn's firm made significant changes in the packaging to stress the authentic origins - and often material changes must be made if you want translation from the American to work.
Equally, if you're starting small, or trying to start a new trend, you can't afford the diseconomies of what Parkyn calls 'the baton race effect', in which advertising and other agencies pass the baton (and sometimes the buck) from one to the other, and you get (and pay for) 'strategic thinking four times over.'
In two years, Integrator has proved its point to the extent that it has grown from two people and zero business to a 1994 billing of £10 million and 21 staff. Whether or not you employ integrated help, your American discovery is unlikely to succeed unless you follow an integrated marketing plan.
Nor are you likely to stumble across a mass market winner like the hamburger. Like pretzels and salsa - and even baking soda toothpaste - today's American find is likely to be a minority product. That doesn't worry Parkyn a bit. It's better, he says, for research to find '20% that strongly like the product', rather than 60% who mildly like - and mildly buy.
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