Snuggie was A Shelf Potato
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 DRTVÂ 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
Shelf potato alert – Microsoft Kin mobile phone
“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.
Failure to “Cross the Chasm” Leads To Shelf Potatoes
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’s Shelf Potato Story
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
Suggest Your Shelf Potatoes
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
