I don't really understand the scorn that people pour on the snuggie. Every time I've bundled under a blanket in the winter I have to either expose my arms (which means exposing my shoulders and half my chest in practice) or not do anything with my hands at all. It sucks, and sleeves are the one thing that makes blankets usable.
My working theory as of now is that the mockers probably live in warm West Coast cities where there's no need for a blanket at all, ever, so they've never personally encountered the problem.
You know, if you just developed one product and rolled it out in different markets with different names, you could do pretty effective A/B testing on which name is more appealing.
No you couldn't, suppose your A does better in the first market and your B worse (accounting for size) in the second. You choose A. Which does even worse in second market. B was doing the best job for the second market, it is just that market is less open to your product, B would have totally pwned in the first market.
You have to do the A/B within the same market to get useful results.
Use a good enough mix of similar markets and you'll get not-entirely bogus results. The problem you're talking about had occurred to me too, actually, since markets vary widely in climate. Market it in Alaska and people never, not even in the summer, get used to light clothing for long enough to prefer blankets over heavy clothes when on the couch anyway. Market it in Florida and it never gets cold enough to use a blanket. You'd have to control for climate and culture, which across the US would be challenging (to say nothing of the world).
There are ways to do this in the same market though. Something like Vibram FiveFingers is viral enough that you could probably seed like five Vibram wearers in a single market and have each of them refer to the product under a different name. Then track your incoming search queries or orders and match them by market. If more people order "FiveFingers" than "Toe Shoes" than "Foot Gloves" you have yourself a product name.
Well, until someone clever on the internet exposes you. Then you get free publicity as that company that sells the weird shoes and can't decide what to call them.
Regarding the Sruli Recht Blankoat: "If you have enough money to spend $330 on a gigantic 120-inch long blanket made out of wool from Icelandic sheep, you have enough money to run your heater and walk around in your underwear instead."
This person clearly has no idea how expensive it can be to heat a building in colder climates.
Coming from Chicago and living in a country that has toilets which talk to you but has yet to figure out central heating, every time I see the Snuggie I think "I should buy one for, hmm, everyone I know."
I actually took me 45 second to realize ... it's a bathrobe! But re-imaged and re-packaged!
The thing is that I am sure that there are lots of physical products based on more-or-less re-imaging an existing physical product or perhaps taking a clever combination of existing products.
But the thing, I suspect that when these things succeed, they succeed based on marketing rather than their inherent superiority - the name "Snuggie" mmm! This isn't an negative on these things are business plans... But I (and suspect that a lot of hackers) have two reactions to them:
1) I'm a hacker not a marketer, I might think of an idea like a Snuggie but to succeed, the key ingredient isn't such an idea but the soft-focus infomercial, something I'm not particularly adept at.
2) I do want to revolutionize the world, not just sell another Snuggie. By now, I realize this isn't the most common way folks make money in business (Snuggies are) but it keeps the innovator happy, something that perhaps shouldn't be overlooked.
We talk about incremental development. For the most part, the world develops incrementally. If you think about how many people wear snuggies and how much more comfortable they are, the net change in happiness and well-being is...probably not that great, but in aggregate, deserving of the amount of money you can make from it.
Revolutionizing the world is something that happens by chance when you write a quick-and-dirty operating system for a PDP-7, help breed high-yield wheat strains in Mexico, or hack together a hypertext system with TCP/IP on a NeXT box. So even if you're trying to revolutionize the world, you shouldn't actually try, you should just solve problems here and now that seem ripe for the picking.
bath robes are too constricting for laying on a couch, and not that comfortable all things considered. Further, my bath robes at least are short sleeved.
When it's cold I sleep in my bathrobe (we call it a "dressing gown" which is a particularly poor name for it as one wears it when not getting dressed!). It has long sleeves, is below the knee in length and snug - very comfortable.
My working theory as of now is that the mockers probably live in warm West Coast cities where there's no need for a blanket at all, ever, so they've never personally encountered the problem.
Or in heated homes... but yes, I think your working theory is spot-on.
My theory is that products that are designed to provide comfort are more susceptible to scorn because being "tough" makes some people feel good.
There obviously are real technical reasons when choosing between a Snuggie vs a blanket, or a Segway vs a bike, or TaeKwonDo vs Pilates, but I think it's naive to think that:
- we choose products/services solely based on rational analysis
- our tastes are not affected by our perception of social expectations
Excellent comparison. I too thought the snuggie was a joke, but a clever part of their strategy was that they launched in late summer/fall...people laughed about it, but by the time it got cold, (and the product became useful) they were already aware of it.
It's also a good lesson in the importance of branding - it has a good name instead of a descriptor, and not a web-2.0-meaningless-name either. Surprisingly, these kind of products been on the market for 10 years. But 'slanket' sounds like some kind of endangered fish that nobody cares about (edit: as below, it may be a better product, but I still say that a bad name = bad sales) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleeved_blanket
Every time I get the urge to mock the snuggie, I just think about the fact they've sold >4 million of them.
Ice cream glove - a product that fixes a minor problem that very few people have very rarely.
Snuggie (or the Slanket for the upper crust) - a product that fixes a problem that cold people have while watching television. Probably advertised to them while they're watching television too.
You only know the Snuggie is for watching TV in hindsight - because customers told us. I think it's a tough call when both products are still the idea phase.
Exactly. Being cold is an ongoing problem. Getting ice cream on my hands is something I fix by pulling out a wet nap or running my hands under the nearest source of water.
No one would carry around a bulky glove to avoid 10 seconds of inconvenience. People most certainly will buy a better blanket to avoid freezing their butt off all night.
They're only comparable if you really put absolutely no thought into the problems they "solve".
One thing that the article misses is that there is a way to tell the difference: do you find your product useful?
Clearly there are major limitations to this heuristic; you might be strange or exceptional in some way that makes the inference fail, and a sample size of one (or even two, three, four etc.) will not give you the same certainty as a large userbase. It is, however, better than nothing.
Note that this is not an "exercise at the whiteboard"—you have to actually build the thing. Given this caveat, their claim holds, but there's a clearly identifiable step (actually, there are several, but this distinction is not necessary for the argument at hand) between scribbling on a whiteboard and releasing a product for public use.
> So how can you tell the difference between an Ice Cream Glove and a Snuggie? You can’t.
Steve Jobs can. :-)
I'm only half joking. I know of no name for whatever ethereal quality Jobs possesses, but it is often the difference between a successful entrepreneur and an unsuccessful one.
Building every single product idea to the point that you can get it into customers hands just requires too many resources. You have to narrow down the playing field before you start prototyping, even. It's impossible to let your customers make all the decisions.
Some people just have the innate crystal ball which tells them what customers want and what they don't.
I think read an interview with Jobs where said something akin to every product he produced, he produced because he and his team found it super-cool and really wanted to have it - and that they did very little other market research.
IF you can create things like that, that have the wow factor, THEN you're there. But this not the Snuggie OR the Ice Cream Glove, this is the hover board, once you have a real, working copy.
-- There you have a third point the article leaves out. It's not hard to think of Hover Boards, it's very hard to make them. I suspect that Jobs was in the right place at the right time to rise to the level where he could demand that every product be a Hover Board and get that demand often met. That's not always where entrepreneur wind-up and plenty of folks, more folks, make money with Snuggies than with Hover Boards BUT the conditions for Hover Board Success should not be overlooked.
In particular, Jobs is quoted as saying "It’s not about pop culture, and it’s not about fooling people, and it’s not about convincing people that they want something they don’t. We figure out what we want. And I think we’re pretty good at having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it, too. That’s what we get paid to do."
Jobs' unique ability is the ability to repeat this kind of insight. For many entrepreneurs, there's a large element of chance that aligns what they want with what the market wants.
So how can you tell the difference between an Ice Cream Glove and a Snuggie? You can’t. Only your customers can. There is literally no exercise at the whiteboard you can use to find this out ahead of time. A lot of startups - and a lot of technologists - make this mistake.
I know I have. We're so used to attacking problems on the whiteboard, we often forget about the one of the biggest problems of all: when to turn off the computer and shut down the whiteboard. Can lead to very expensive mistakes.
I love Snuggie. Their video makes me want to buy one because of it's "emotional" marketing. All of the circumstances they're showing - getting up to grab drink, chilling on the couch while watching tv etc..I can see myself doing.
I didn't watch the Ali G video, but I could actually see myself buying an ice cream glove if it was presented(read marketed) well..
I like ice cream and I hate using up napkins after eating ice cream.
The Snuggie is actually a great product if you often laptop in a cold house. It keeps you warm but still lets you use your arms. Although I much prefer the slightly more expensive Slanket. This review of all the products on the market probably started as a joke (they include a review of a robe warn backward), but the info turns out to be good:
http://community.cbs47.tv/blogs/techtracker/archive/2009/03/...
Indeed, you could just put it on forwards. Seems like it would be warmer as it wraps around properly. The main difference is it won't cover your feet - but of course this allows you to walk. And there are these newfangled things called "slippers" that could help. I'm off to make an infomercial about how those snuggies are OK, but a pain every time I need to get up and walk somewhere...
why don't people wear sweaters and sweat pants over their clothes? and a hat. so much heat is lost through the head! if i did have a snuggie the first thing i'd do is sew on a hood.
when i go pond swimming in the fall and spring (in NewEngland), i didn't buy a wetsuit. i just wear the clothes i already have into the water. and sturdy hat. man, the hat makes all the difference.
The ice glove is something people in the USA just wouldn't use because no body wears gloves of any sort and the "use-value" of wearing something all the time to protect yourself from something you do only occasionally is negative.
The Snuggie is useful and more importantly, it's use is immediately obvious, in the sense that you use it like a blank but with some added benefits (some of which you can get from a bathrobe, especially wool bathrobes went out of style a while back). The Snuggie is still mostly marketing, since it doesn't just there among the zillions of clothing types out there.
The lesson is that if you have something that offers little originality and value, it's best to offer in a warm, feel-good package that people can understand. Indeed, I suspect the package and the understanding where the originality of the product starts and the rest of it is just ... filler. (note the review that mentions how the Snuggie is simply an incredibly poor-quality effort at meeting the need it highlights).
If the ice-clean glove was really cheap and dispossible, you might be able to sell it to ... ice clean vendors. That might actually be a product, not necessarily good but hey.
Er, I'm not quite sure you read the article, which basically propped up a kinda-lame joke intended to poke fun at VCs, then missed the point of the joke entirely while explaining its punchline.
I say marketing because the Ice Cream Glove is a joke, whereas the Snuggie has marketing.
I'm fairly sure that if you marketed the Ice Cream Glove with shouty ads in Australia, it'd sell like hotcakes.
My working theory as of now is that the mockers probably live in warm West Coast cities where there's no need for a blanket at all, ever, so they've never personally encountered the problem.