End-user confusion about drills and drivers is rampant – although the model in this stock photo looks more bored than confused.

Consider an example from the realm of the home store where tool makers have created a wilderness of product, category and project names that stand in the way of revenue and market share growth.

No tool category is more confused than drills and drivers. And over the past few years manufacturers have added to the confusion with the impact driver. The impact driver is a superb, compact tool that use small bursts of torque to deliver turning power around the screw, bolt or nut.

“Impact driver” is a strong label for the category of tools because they are used by pro and DIY alike primarily to drive screws and self-tapping hex headed screws (e.g. those used for steel studs). Impact drivers are also used, but less often, to drive lag bolts, remove small stuck bolts, and in a few other driving situations.

In other words, from both the pro and DIY end user point of view, they are a superb evolution of the drill/driver. Except, manufacturers never communicated their value and left purchasers to accidentally buy an impact driver in order to discover it’s value.

And now, looking around the home store, I’m seeing a bunch of shelves labeled “impact wrench”. Huh? Impact wrench?

An impact wrench is a big tool used on cars, trucks, and in factories that delivers 2500 to 7000 in-lbs of torque and is used for the heaviest duty work on cars and trucks. It also exclusively drives sockets and is used on heavy bolts.

But while the tools in these packages labeled “impact wrench” do deliver small torque impacts – they are merely 500 to 1300 in-lbs. In other words, light enough torque to drive screws or hex head screws without breaking them. (It may be that engineers would say the impact drivers are merely lightweight impact wrenches. Maybe so. But consumer and pro alike understand them as a dramatic improvement on the drill/driver.)

How can we expect consumers to buy products without consistent categories and names? This challenge is particularly miserable in the drill and driver category.

Even before impact drivers, purchasers were already confused by the chaotic range of language used to describe the features and benefits of drills, drivers, and hammer drills. And they were, and are, even more confused by battery sizes and types.

Why confusion? In part, companies have grasped for short-term profits in ways that fragment the categories – making the retail shelf chaotic in return for a faint hope of competitive advantage. But also, there has been very little effective mass communication for these tools.

The confusion is quite serious. To see it, just walk the aisle at any retailer and try to envision what a consumer faces.

And it’s not just DIY consumers who are confused. Most of the labor that works for contractor’s thinks a hammer drill and an impact wrench are the same thing. For clarity, they’re entirely different. The hammer drill adds impact along the axis of the drill to help masonry bits break out more material. The impact driver generates small impacts in the plane of the screw head (at a 90 degree angle to the axis) to tighten or loosen screws, bolts, and nuts.

Two recommendations:

My agency’s research finds that nearly every area of the hardware business is losing money because of problems with language. It’s particularly problematic for products like saws and drills. It’s even worse when it comes to talking about projects and the best practices for those projects.

1. If the tool & hardware business is to make its next step in growth, we’ve all got to become better at controlling these names. Because clear naming drives product sales. In fact, good, clear end-user driven names can drive sales as much as 3 or 4 times higher.

2. The tool and hardware business must start communicating about it’s products. Lack of communication created the confusion amongst impact drivers, impact wrenches, and hammer drills. But it goes much deeper. Engineering teams throughout the business are inventing amazing new products faster than potential buyers are told about them. But without communication it’s as if the product advances don’t exist. (If a product’s invented and no one knows about it, was it really invented?)

These product advances are exciting. So it’s sad that our business too often lacks the communication savvy to cash in on the value of those advances.

Question is: Which manufacturers and retailers will do the hard work to dramatically increase their profits by sorting out naming so that products fly off the shelf? Those who don’t will continue to create shelf potato after shelf potato.

Copyright 2010 – Doug Garnett

Brand Advertising is Often the Wrong Choice for New Products

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 Steps Can Turn Your Advertising from a Product Liability into Dramatic Success

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

How much unrealized profit do you have sitting on the shelf? If only you could 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.)

Most new product action leaves little memory in the consumer mind - unless a product succeeds.

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

Avoid Shelf Potatoes by succeeding the first time. This is critical both with retailers and inside your company. Consumers are more forgiving.

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

Eurovan vacation in Eastern Washington

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.

For kids, no more magical way to travel than a poptop camper. It's amazing how much more they can interact while facing each other across the table.

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.

Sitting on the street people don't know it has a poptop, sleeps four comfortable, or sleeps 2 upstairs. This is a marketing disadvantage.

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 like this were on the shelf for nearly 20 years before communication made a breakthrough

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.

Does your location help consumers choose your product?

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

Why would a shelf potato this cozy want to race out the door?

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

“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.

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

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