Archive
Consumer Solar Needs a Steve Jobs to Make it Fly Off the Shelf.
I love solar energy. And it’s encouraging that tremendous advances in technology have driven panel costs down while delivering more energy from smaller packages.
Yet, despite major investement in solar, the past 4 years have been more difficult for the solar energy industry than I’d expect – high profile bankruptcies, accusation of product dumping by Chinese manufacturers, and a Republican lust to create a scandal from these failures. And, from what I can see, the consumer solar applications just aren’t moving like they should.
There is a tendency with emerging markets to suggest the problems are technological. But I disagree – at least in the standard way we think about technology. Right now, it looks like core technology advancement has outpaced solar demand – driven by innovations in savvy & low cost manufacture as well as increasing energy output. That suggests the problems are more subtle. Read more…
Impact Driver or Impact Wrench? Confused Names Keep Products on the Shelf
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. Read more…
Avoid Shelf Potatoes: Do It Right the First Time
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. Read more…
Even Cars Can Be Shelf Potatoes. Consider Volkswagon’s Eurovan
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: Read more…
Eight (8) Reasons Products Sit on the Retail Shelf
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. Read more…
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.) Read more…
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. Read more…
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
The Shelf Potato 