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

Two and a half years ago I purchased my 2001 Eurovan (Weekender) – a pop top camper that carries 7, sleeps four, hauls 4′ by 8′ sheets of plywood inside, and lets our kids play across a table on road trips. Even better, VW finally upgraded to a strong motor so that the van powers it’s way over mountain passes.

The Eurovan excites passion among those who own them or would like to own them. We Eurovan owners wave to each other on the road and stop to talk in the parking lot. I’ve even had an owner leave me a note asking me to help him find a roof rack setup like the one on ours. BUT, in 2003 VW cancelled the product in the US.

And that leads us to today’s installment of ShelfPotato Diaries. Why did a car that excites this passion eventually fail? It seems their rationale for cancellation included two primary reasons:

1. Sales were lackluster.
2. VW decided they couldn’t compete with the features on minivans.

These are just the final reasons it was cancelled. Much earlier, I think they made a common shelf potato error: they chose not to embrace their product for its true quirky glory. And this affected everything.

Targeting. VW tried to sell the Eurovan as a minivan. This meant targeting a vast market where family features outweighed the value VW brought. And, it meant selling where VW’s quirkiness wasn’t valued. Most families enjoy their minivans (like we enjoyed our Chrysler minivan). But my family LOVES the Eurovan. This choice doomed the Eurovan from the start and lost the excitement that a descendant of the early VW bus should have carried.

Product Personality. So here’s this product with tremendous personality. But VW buried it with blandness. The Eurovan is clearly the most dull of their three vans.

The Poptop. A poptop turns the dullness of a minivan into an exceptional family adventure. But VW hid the poptop by making it so sleek you don’t notice it. This apparently good engineering choice was actually a very poor marketing choice. Why hide your best feature? Incidentally, the rear seating setup in the weekender is another superb feature – but you’d never know about it until you sit inside the Eurovan.

Ineffective Communication. VW never got across the family thrill of owning a Weekender. A good friend of mine observed how much excitement he hears from my family as we talk about the car. The boys are so proud of the poptop that they think having the transformer of cars is even cooler than having a Porsche (tho’ probably not a Ferrari).

Bad Juju for the VW Brand. After releasing the new Beetle, VW descended into a line of heavily dull cars (no matter how exciting their ads said they were). This kept people out of the showrooms so, lacking communication, they never discovered the Eurovan’s value. And that meant this once passionate brand of the un-typical lost its core audience of people – people who don’t want a car that looks like a Honda.

VW’s van program is in shambles today. They recently released a rebadged Chrysler van then tried to tell us it was uniquely VW. Even worse, they may never produce another poptop (which concerns one of my boys who wants to be able to buy one when he’s a dad).

A True Measure of Their Brand Pain. I was talking with the guy who runs the front office at my VW/Porsche/Audi repair shop. They find that VW owners aren’t re-purchasing the brand. Because these brand loyalists don’t want the young sexy pocket rockets that seem to have distracted VW. Instead, VW’s are replaced most often with Subaru’s. (So now the repair shop has had to grow to handle VW/Porsche/Audi…and Subaru.)

VW’s biggest successes come from the cars with personality – an element of brand truth that ad guru William Bernbach leveraged 50 years to deliver huge impact from tiny ad budgets.

This leads to a shelf potato truth: Marketers too often try to sell what they think they should sell – instead of selling the products they have to the audience that will buy them. And there’s no faster way to turn a good product into a shelf potato.

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

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