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THE MARKET
They’re little and they stick — but not
too hard. That’s why everyone loves
Post-it® Notes! Yet the unique
adhesive that makes these little notes
so indispensable waited more than
a decade for its chance to change
the world.
3M created an entirely new
market when it launched
Post-it® Notes. It is hard to
knowhowoffices survived
before ‘Repositionable
Notes’were invented. In
any office today,
computer terminals,
doors, desks and folders
will be dotted with the familiar brightly-coloured
notes. They have become an essential element of
our working - and home - lives. The Post-it®Note
is a product we didn’t realisewe needed until it was
invented.
Doing away with the need to scribble on pieces
of paper and attach notes with paper clips, Post-
it® Notes target any business which needs to
remember, communicate and organise information;
in other words, every business. According to 3M’s
research, secretarial is the largest slice of the Post-
it®Notemarket, with big users including education,
management training and the small office/home
office (SOHO) sector.
Despite what everyone says
about e-mail doing away with the
hand-written word, 75 per cent of
adults are described as ‘note
writers’. Of these, 56 per cent are
heavy users of repositionable
notes, 30 per cent are light users
and 14 per cent don’t use them at
all. Curiously, 71 per cent of heavy
repositionable note users are
women. Women also go for the
brightly coloured notes more than
men, which partly explains why
Post-it® Notes are now available
in many more colours than the
original Canary®Yellow.
ACHIEVEMENTS
The Post-it®Notewas a genuinely
important invention. Fortune
Magazine recognised this when, in
November 1999, it ranked the Post-
it® Note in its Products of the
Century League. Alongside the
paper clip, the Xerox photocopier
and fax machine, the Intel
microprocessor and the Apple
Macintosh, 3M’s adhesive note was judged
to be a product that has helped to revolutionise the
workplace.
As with other brand names in the Fortune league
- like Xerox and Hoover - the Post-it® is one of
those rare trademarks which has gained fame the
world over and is immediately identifiedwith 3M’s
innovative repositionable yellownotes. That in itself
is an enviable achievement and a formidable
marketing position for any brand.
Not surprisingly, brand awareness is very
high, with 62 per cent spontaneous
and 95 per cent prompted awareness.
The Post-it® Note, and its
inventor,Art Fry, have been suitably
honoured over the years. Fry
received theOutstandingAlumni
Award from the University of
Minnesota, the Premio Smau
Industrial Design Award from
the Italian Design Association
and was voted one of the best
100 people in the world by
EsquireMagazine. The product
has even been celebrated in a
book, called ‘Rapid Problem
Solving with Post-it® Notes’.
HISTORY
In the 1970s, 3M scientist Art Fry used
to sing in a church choir on Sundays. His idea for
the Post-it®Note came when he was looking for a
way of organising musical scores and song sheets
for the service. Making do with marks made from
small slips of paper, he began to think of how he
ideally needed a bookmark that would attach and
detach lightly, stick without falling off and not
damage the paper.
Dr. Spencer Silver, a 3Mscientist, haddiscovered
the formula for the sticky stuff back in 1968. But it
was Art Fry who finally came up
with a practical use for it. So, taking
advantage of a 3M policy known
as the “bootlegging” policy, Fry
used a portion of hisworking hours
to develop a solution to his
problem. Now theworld is singing
the praises of his pet project: Post-
it® Notes.
After years of product
development, 3M introduced the
concept of Post-it® Notes in four
majormarkets in1977. Butwithout
samples to try, consumers didn’t
catch on. A year later, 3M
blanketed theBoise, Idaho, market
with samples of Post-it® Notes.
After trying the notes, more than
90 percent of users said they’d buy
the product themselves. By 1980,
Post-it® Notes were being sold
nationally in the USA. Today,
they’re used and enjoyed
throughout the world.
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