Throwing Darts
When we work for appliance manufactures, we often run into the issue of The Big Box, and, especially, Shelf Space. A Shelf-Space project is only indirectly about providing the consumer with a great product; the main point is to get as many products on the shelf as possible.
For example, say you’re selling toasters through a big-box retailer. There are lots of companies that sell toasters, and one shelf available in the appliance section at Target on which to display the product. The marketing strategy at appliance manufacturers seems to be: the more products I have on the shelf, the more I will sell. But the buy at BigBox isn’t going to put 5 toasters that look the same on the shelf, so if you want to sell 5 toasters, they all have to be completely different from each other. 5 different looks, 5 different sets of features.
From a design perspective, this strategy makes life very hard - there’s no brand language (even logo treatments end up varying from product to product), and no solid message to communicate. What’s the company’s point-of-view on toasters when every toaster communicates something different?
From the consumer perspective, it appears to mean more choice, but that’s not real - the products within a line use the same technology, have the same sales & service experience, and, since resources are spread across multiple products instead of used to deeply design one product, the use experience tends to be slap-dash. The manual is unhelpful, the packaging is generic, and the components generic.
And, at its core, this strategy is insulting. The notion seems to be that the consumer goes to BigBox, finds the toaster aisle, and throws a dart. If you have more toasters on the shelf, having more ups the odds that the consumer will hit one of yours with that dart. This model assumes that consumers are unable to discriminate between products at a level any deeper than gross form.
Unfortunately, this strategy seems to work - at least, well enough that manufactures don’t seem interested in trying it any other way. And there doesn’t seem to be any good way to gauge how consumers actually do buy appliances, short of doing actual shop-along research, which appliance companies don’t seem to want to do. If it ain’t broke…
Of course, instead of making 8 different toasters, a company could make one really great one. The companies that have figured this out, like Dualit, don’t sell through big boxes. So, for now, the toss-a-dart model rules.
Question for you: How does your customer select your product? Is there another way they could be doing it?
[Photo by wili_hybrid, used under a Creative Commons license]
