The Shelf Potato

There are many ways that companies conspire to keep their products on the shelf. One critical mistake is with naming.

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

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

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