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

By Ben Smith

“From half baked spud to dud in 2 months is no way to go through a life-cycle son.”

Article: “Death of the Microsoft Kin: A Look at the Evidence”

Article: “Microsoft’s Kin smartphone: No, it kin’t”

If you saw the commercials or talked to a rep in store, you probably couldn’t figure out what problems Kin solved or unmet needs it satisfied. The fact that it was pulled from the market so soon by a company with so deep of pockets leaves only a few conclusions and bigger questions.

How bad were sales – did anybody buy it?

Did Microsoft launch something it knew was bad but needed the flop to validate something? Was it a really expensive live focus group?

Article: “Microsoft Kin Gets a Price Cut…Already”

I always have a problem with companies willingness to make price moves once it is too late. Just 2 days ago the phones prices were effectively cut in half. Why not launch at those price points or heck it’s a mobile phone – why not free. At least they might have gained momentum out of the gate and gotten enough in peoples hands to see if it has legs.

What can we learn from Kin?

Don’t launch it if it is flawed.

Know your level of commitment going in. What are you willing to do if your product doesn’t get off to a good start. A powerhouse like MSFT can pull a stunt like this and still get the buyers to return their call. The rest of us don’t have that luxury.

Communicate what you do that is unique or you do better than anybody else – understand and share whatever your value is. I still have no idea what Kin does that you can’t do with an iPhone, droid, or whatever that motoblur feature is. They had an 8 figure budget to tell their story with and still failed.

Fight where you can win. They weren’t going to out apple apple on tv ads – and other players such as htc are running ads that are pretty clear with their value prop. How did anybody at msft or their agency convince themselves that their story would work. Beyond iPhone I am willing to bet the majority of phone choices occur in-aisle. If MSFT truly believed in the product they should have paid to staff demos 40 hours / week in the verizon stores / best buy.

Above all – be realistic.

Literature about crossing the chasm in technology is filled with reasons products should have been re-engineered, re-thought, or simply never attempted.

But this literature rarely mentions communication. Too bad. Because in my experience, communication may be the single biggest reason for failing to make the jump.

Take DirecTV. I had the good fortune to do some strategic work early in DirecTV’s lifecycle. Their initial marketing was all about technology. Digital picture quality and 250 channels dominated the discussion.

Our work focused on later consumers – not the earliest adopters. And what we found surprised DirecTV. Because we found that these later adopters didn’t care in the least about the values DirecTV was using to sell their product.

This truth frustrated some of the marketing managers. (One demanded the opportunity to personally present the product in focus groups because she figured we just weren’t presenting it right. We don’t usually work that way, but it was good she presented. Because it made even clearer that the problem wasn’t style but content.)

DirecTV was wise enough to learn from what we found. They realized they weren’t showing enough product value for their next consumers to care to buy.

Their solution, the one that kept DirecTV from Shelf Potato-dom, was a combination of communication and packaging.

First, they leveraged their technology, but repackaged it into something sports enthusiasts around the nation couldn’t get anywhere else: every football game from their favorite team.

Then, they re-built their communication to make this a primary value. (Of course, I’m leaving unspoken the fact that at the same time rural customers loved DirecTV because it was so much better than a satellite dish. But the rural market was never their primary goal.)

Take care as you consider this case: the early adopter values that DirecTV espoused melted deep into the background. And the values that kept them from being a shelf potato were entirely unmentioned in their early marketing.

Crossing the chasm is rarely a matter of tweaking a few words. It requires digging much deeper to find significant value to deliver to later consumers.

And maybe that’s one of the biggest differences between consumers on either side of the chasm. Early adopters can be easily satisfied by the technology. But later adopters need value.

So if you have a shelf potato, look closely to find the value you can deliver that will be meaningful to your larger group of consumers.

Copyright 2010 – Doug Garnett

WebTV is a great example of a Shelf Potato success.

WebTV has been around for more than a decade. And while it hasn’t found a broad enough mass audience to dominate tech conversation, it has sold quite well to a niche consumer electronic audience.

But WebTV sold poorly at the start. The Philips version hit the shelf late 1996 supported by around $10 million in sexy :30 television spots. And, it sat on the shelf…and sat and sat. I have been told that it only sold when the regional specialists from Philips were in the store.

In the beginning, it took a specialist because consumers needed a massive information fix at retail. Unfortunately, in the same 45 minutes it took a salesman to make one WebTV sale, that salesman could sell 3 DVD players of equal value. So retailers didn’t drive sales because selling WebTVs lost them money.

Then, in October 1997, Philips released a half hour infomercial for the product. And by mid November, with only a few million in ad dollars, they had to take the infomercial off-air because they had sold out at retail. (And, of course, they put it back on-air as soon as the stores were re-stocked.)

Why did a few million dollars in infomercial time dramatically outperform over $10M in :30 second spot time? The infomercial solved the communication problem that kept units on the shelf. With the infomercial on-air average sell time dropped from 45 minutes to 5 minutes and it no longer required the regional specialist.

What lesson do we learn from this? WebTV was a perfectly good product with a strong market potential. So lackluster sales don’t necessarily say anything about the value of the product. And sometimes it’s a matter of putting out the right communication for the product to fly off the shelves.

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