The Shelf Potato

When you have a new product, the first order of business is getting consumers to love the product – love it so much they buy it.

Unfortunately, the ad/creative business is obsessed with brand advertising. And, sadly, choosing brand advertising for new products is a leading cause of Shelf Potato-dom. (With the term “brand advertising”, I refer to advertising that spends the bulk of time and energy building brand connections – often by saying either “this brand understand you” or “our brand’s cool will rub off on you if you buy our products”.)

Agencies tend toward “brand advertising” because they can focus mostly on making advertising that consumers “love”. That makes for a fun creative process. Even better, brand advertising makes the best portfolio pieces.

But using brand advertising at the wrong time can kill a product introduction because brand advertising leaves behind very little communication about the product. Consumers buy products when they know why they are meaningful to them and are quite harsh about this judgement. If consumer aren’t told meaningful reasons they’d want a product, then the product “doesn’t exist” (no matter how brilliant your engineering team). And, if the product doesn’t exist for consumers, then the profits don’t exist either.

Five key steps can keep your new products from suffering death by brand advertising:

Make the Product the Hero. It’s all too easy for the creative process to focus on the wrong hero – the actors, the clever writing, the art direction, the movie-like experience, or the agency/creative team. Keep your products from becoming shelf potatoes by making the product the hero in the advertising.

Trust That Consumers Care. Traditional agency teams often believe that consumers don’t want to know about products. I beg to differ. Love of product is a pre-historic human impulse – one that started when the first human kept a specific animal skin because it covered them better than other skins. If a product is worth inventing, people want to know what makes it meaningful.

Avoid the Staleness of Brochure Copy (but make great brochures). Product messages need fresh words. But, all-too-often the words around the product are as stale as those we find in most auto brochures (a waste of printing). Many creative teams and companies simply don’t have the instincts to make product oriented long copy interesting. So they deliver dull and “expected” copy that consumers will never hear.

Make An Offer. The single most critical thing you can do for your brand is to get your product into consumer hands. So use directive language that says “buy this product”. And make your communication so valuable to consumers that there’s a reason to act upon it.

Use Agencies with a New Product Specialty. Most agencies don’t have strong new product skills (though most will tell you they do). Most TV and video producers don’t either. And most designers and art directors don’t. With superb skills at crafting brilliant brand advertising, they don’t know how to make the product the hero. So look for an agency whose work shows they make new products succeed or regularly take existing products to new markets.

Product Oriented Advertising Breaks Through! When you make effective product-based advertising, your work will break through the clutter — without women on bicycles trailing 5 feet of hair from their armpits (whose ad was that, anyway?).

Ads like these are typical of the disembodied creative that agencies create attempting to break through consumer consciousness with creativity alone – and without product connections. Except a stray but clever creative idea won’t live in the consumer mind in a way that drives product sales (our minds don’t work that way).

By contrast, if your development team is any good, then your product will be quite unique – highly differentiated so that it delivers meaningful advantages. And a creative team that relies on those advantages, finds creative that breaks-through and sticks in the consumer mind.

And that means success — making your product a Shelf Potato candidate no longer.

Copyright 2010 – Doug Garnett

Grills nearly identical to George Foreman’s lingered on store shelves for nearly 20 years. Then, the Foreman infomercial blew the doors off driving over $100M in sales in two years. And we learned that while the Grill delivered tremendous value to consumers, no one had known of those benefits or believed it would deliver them.

Not all Shelf Potatoes have potential like the Foreman Grill. Some sit on the shelf because they should. Contributor Ben Smith has noted that the Microsoft Kin was released with massive communication, failed to show unique value, then lingered on the shelf only to be cancelled leaving a black spot on Microsoft’s reputation.

How can you tell whether you have a Foreman Grill, a Kin, or something in between? Start by identifying the problems that keep it on the shelf. Here’s a list of the most common types of problems I’ve seen.

1. Consumers don’t know why they should care about the product. We all have busy lives. And successful manufacturers reach out to consumers to show the value of the product through advertising and PR. It’s an extraordinarily rare product that walks out the door when you do no more than put it on the shelf.

2. Consumers won’t find out about the product in their daily grind. We live by patterns. Patterns as we move through a store. Patterns in how we live at home. New products must worm their way into our minds despite the fact that patterns often present a barrier. And that means communication that reaches out to consumers off-line. Be wary of pure online plays. These patterns are notoriously resistant to efforts to reach out with web based initiatives.

3. The product is stocked in the wrong part of the store. Some shelf potatoes can be brought to life merely by moving them from one spot to another. A friend of mine had tremendous impact moving certain food products out of the spice and baking aisle and locating them with the fresh vegetable section. We’ve all seen cases like this. And yet it’s easy for products to sit in the wrong place when we fall back on rigid category thinking that is confirmed by the common silo’s found among retail buyer’s.

4. The retail operation can’t support the product. In mass retail, marketing must plan that most sales associates are so overloaded with products that the most you can hope they know is that your product exists and where someone can find it on the shelf. So if you have a complex product, like I discussed in my WebTV post, it’s your job to find clever ways to drive consumer demand.

5. Your packaging isn’t helping – and might even be hurting. Ah, packaging. Too often we ask too much of it. And ironically, too often we ignore the opportunity to use it for communication. While ad agencies often aren’t the right teams to design packaging, perhaps you should bring them together with your internal or external designers so that all of your communication gains power through integration.

6. Sitting on the shelf, the price appears high relative to the value consumers perceive. You can respond in several ways. Obviously, you could choose to decrease price. But the best long term benefits come through other approaches. How can you increase awareness of the products value – thereby increasing the price people will pay?

7. The product started well and lost momentum. This excellent post from RetailLeverage discusses important steps for maintaining momentum. For example, “Keep the exact product on the shelf for as long as possible.” (I’m reminded of a corresponding truth about advertising: Companies grow tired of their advertising long, long before it loses its effectiveness with consumers.)

8. And of course, there’s the ultimate problem: The product simply doesn’t offer enough consumer value. In this case, it’s better to cut your losses.

Aren’t the solutions to these problems expensive? None of the problems can be solved for free. Otherwise, the products wouldn’t be sitting on the shelf. But unfortunately, this fear of costs can lead companies to abandon Shelf Potatoes.

In marketing discussions, companies often minimize the development costs and exceptionally high risks in a new product development. So their fear of costs for shelf potatoes isn’t balanced by an accurate sense of the costs and risks of new product investment. Because redeeming a shelf potato be much less expensive, lower risk, and carries a much higher potential profit reward.

And this makes it fun to wander the back store rooms of manufacturers talking with them about their potatoes. Because some of their biggest potentials for high profit margins are already sitting on the shelf.

Copyright 2010 – Doug Garnett

For years, a blanket with sleeves called the Slanket sat on shelves. And it wasn’t alone as Gizmodo tells us. These blankets with sleeves sold okay. And when you read reviews by people who owned them, they liked them.

But they never sold in the volume that the Snuggie has. So what turned Snuggie into a super-hit? Communication.

Yup, those cheesy ads. Love them, hate them, or merely put up with them (because what choice is there?), Snuggie’s advertising drives sales. I guess we needed to see the entire family cheering on their team while dressed in Snuggies (and with their backs uncovered). And without their ads we’d still look at a Slanket on the shelves (if they ever got there) and decide they looked just like … well … a blanket. If you’d run into the Slanket at retail, would you have known why you might want one? (And did they have them in leopard print? Oops. That came later.)

Snuggie took advantage of a specific type of direct response television (DRTV) campaign. The overwhelming presence of the advertising was made possible because the DRTV campaign made money on TV. (Although, despite their on-air profit the vast majority of Snuggie profits happen at retail.)

Brands can leverage DRTV to drive similar retail sales. But I wouldn’t recommend following the Snuggie model. The Snuggie is a kitsch product with a short lifetime as a mass product (although it may live on at low volume like the ChiaPet). The AllStar marketing team has taken steps that would be suicide for a brand. But that’s okay for them. As part of the traditional DRTV business, Allstar will take the money and run – without building a brand.

The good news is that brands can leverage DRTV to achieve dramatic sales impact with a different style of campaign. This campaign exerts more control over the advertising content, steps back from the blow-out media spending, and controls other campaign factors so that the campaign and brand have a long life.

Brands also face constraints from existing retail relationship that can make it tough to be profitable through direct sales. That’s okay because for established brands being profitable on direct sales isn’t most critical. For a brand, the biggest DRTV driven profit potential is always at retail. (In fact, in the 1990′s I helped brands like Wella-Balsam, IBM and P&G evaluate DRTV profits if used as a sales channel. This direct profit simply wasn’t big enough to be pursued for its own sake.)

Away from the Snuggie model there’s a much more exciting model based on DRTV’s retail profit. And a well constructed and sales oriented DRTV campaign can drive this profit for very low cost – saving ad dollars or stretching ad budgets. (A well constructed sales-oriented brand DRTV campaign can sell enough product that the profits from direct sales cover half to three quarters of the media cost leading to an 8x to 10x reduction in ad cost.)

But take care. Despite the chutzpah in their sales presentations, some of the largest brand DRTV providers don’t know how sell effectively on TV. They make plenty of money creating ads that simply make sure their clients get the reduced direct response media rates. But in that case you’ll reap only a part of DRTV’s value. When you add profit from sales on top of media savings, then the equation gets most interesting.

Enough about those stuffy old brands. Snuggie’s brand tonality is clearly a TV version of the ads in the back of the National Enquirer. Despite this, as a Shelf Potato enthusiast, it’s great to see yet one more potato get up off the shelf and race out the door – in this case millions of units at a time.

Copyright 2010 – Doug Garnett

This blog is dedicated to the retail challenge we call the Shelf Potato. And, to the opportunity reflected in shelf potatoes.

Because marketing experience shows that products don’t necessarily languish on the shelves because they’re bad products. Quite often they lack the communication support needed to connect consumers with the reasons they should care about the product.

So use the comment space below to post your shelf potato stories and let’s discuss this serious challenge to retail success.

Copyright 2010 – Doug Garnett