The Shelf Potato

Assuming you have a product that has become a shelf potato and it looks like you can bring it alive, how do you get past the politics?

One general theme affects politics of potatoes: perspectives about money. On the one hand, companies easily minimize development costs when they are excited about a new product. Meanwhile, the marketing costs required to redeem a shelf potato flash onto everyone’s radar screen. So overall, your biggest challenge is shifting the corporate eye from the fresh, new thing to the reality of finding the highest returns for the lowest investment.

And now, more thoughts about the politics…

1. Know that anti-potato politics work against the corporation’s best financial interest. That means you have a strong position – by staying focused on the money. If a spud can be redeemed, you monetize a past investment in product development. And that can be done for dramatically less money than creating a new product.

2. Watch the politics within marketing. Sadly, politics is a fundamentally human tendancy and disruptive politics can even drive small organizations. So be ready. Be patient. But don’t back down from your fundamental truth: If you’re right and the potato comes alive, it’s a massive financial win for the company at lower risk than any new products.

3. Know that politics aren’t just the one’s in marketing. For example, finance teams are often paid to be conservative – to challenge assumptions. I don’t resent this kind of pressure. Since you can discuss potatoes with firmer financial reasoning, you can win over the finance team if it’s a solid proposition. And if its not a great proposition, then you’ve built credibility with the finance team by engaging in reasonable discussion.

4. Retailer politics are often most critical. Once a product has been on the shelf and failed to move, it’s hard to regain trust. Your ability to make it past these politics is a matter of trust and your history with the retailer. It’s also helped if the retailer has experience with similar challenges in the past. (BUT, this is also why its so critical to succeed out the door.)

5. With consumers, you have the least problems. You might wonder, won’t consumers have a bad taste? Not in my experience. Most Shelf Potato stumblings have all been in your company and the channel – below consumer radar. Even in the case of what we’d all consider a massive high-profile failure like Microsoft’s Kin, mass consumer perception isn’t likely to have turned against the product. Mass attitudes take years to build. So even though negatives generally build quicker than positives, consumers are the least of your worries.

6. “But Brand X tried this product, too, and theirs failed”. I’m fascinated by this type of discussion because it shows the danger of perspective within an industry. Major releases from competitors can easily dominate our view of the business. But we must remember that a failure that appears large in our minds probably didn’t even reserve a flea-sized spot in consumer minds. It’s possible that your failure and your competitors failure are critical red flags. But I’ve found it much more likely that both companies failed to execute well enough for the product to succeed – most often by failing to invest in the consumer communication required to make the product thrive.

If the politics in your operation are thick, you might wonder whether the potato has come out of the ground and into the french fryer. But, don’t let this stop you unless it’s a fundamentally un-redeemable situation.

After all, your product’s potential may be massive. George Foreman style grills sat on shelves for decades before launching into the retail stratosphere. Your company might might have a similar gold mine already sitting on the shelf.

Copyright 2010 – Doug Garnett

A shelf potato has failed in its first attempt to make a first impression. And that means that corporate and retailer politics may be stacked against efforts to make them come alive.

So, the most important Shelf Potato lesson is that AVOIDING them in the first place is your best way to success.

How can products avoid becoming potatoes? Learn from the lessons here. Know when you need communication to drive a product and either supply that communication or don’t proceed with introduction. Use research (and honest introspection) to detect problems ahead of time. Negotiate carefully with retailers to ensure the right placement. And, avoid putting a product at mass retail before you’re ready. Quite often, retail merchandisers will love a product but not be the best judges of the challenges it will face on the shelf.

From the School of Hard Knocks… Unfortunately, this simple idea turns out to be much harder in the reality of company operations.

I once dealt with a classic shelf potato – a product where people who owned it loved it. But, without communication the product sat on the shelf.

We knew communication was critical from early research. And, in a key 8 hour strategic meeting, the entire team (marketing, finance, sales, development, production, advertising) concluded that this product should be introduced slowly – not with big box retailers until we had the right communication in place. Except, one week later, the sales team sold the product into big box with an agreement to put it on their shelves day one.

Despite this violation of management trust (another issue entirely), the company let the product hit the shelves without communication and without a strong plan for getting that communication out. It took 4 more months to get good communication in place. But by that time, the big box stores decided the product was a dud and kicked it out. Then, the client cancelled the product because of big box experience (and some uncontrolled costs from over-design).

I know there’s no guarantees in the world of new products, but this one would have sold with the communication. (My team has had superb results using a strategic and sales-oriented research approach to figure out how to create success.) Instead, the sales team got greedy and that led to the failure. (It’s a rare corporation who is willing to walk away from a big box order – even when it’s against the their best interest.)

So, always care about that first impression with your team and at your retail partners. But worry less about consumers who are much more forgiving – and often never even hear about these products because they fail so quickly.

All too often, great products who have a poor first rollout descend into Shelf Potato status and never get the second chance that might bring them alive.

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

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

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

Ben Smith, co-author of the RetailLeverage.com blog, is going to be commenting on the topic of Shelf Potatoes. Ben has a superb background dealing with the retail channel from the manufacturer side. He has also been deeply involved with creating advertising to solve retail problems.

His twitter feed can be found at @RetailLeverage and there’s great related content at RetailLeverage.com

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