Description: A digital day counter for refrigerator items
Main Pitch: "You'll always know what's fresh and what's not"
Main Offer: $10 for four in various colors
Bonus: Double the offer (just pay separate S&H)
Marketer: Telebrands
Website: www.GetDaysAgo.com
Prediction: Unlikely to succeed
My instinct here is that people who care about the exact freshness of their food use various labeling systems, such as stickers you can write dates on. For want of a better term, this is the "obsessive-compulsive" crowd. People who are all about organization. And like Greens or Germaphobes, they are in the minority.
When it comes to determining food freshness, I'd wager most people use their memory and the old "sniff test" dramatized in the opening of this commercial. Or some version of the “if it looks like a science project, toss it" approach. For them, this is an easy solution to what is more of a nuisance than a painful problem.
In other words, this is another solution in search of a problem, or what I also like to call a "contrived problem." DRTV spots featuring such problems are not uncommon. I think we see a lot of it because those tasked with selecting products for DRTV sometimes take the "must solve a problem" criterion too lightly.
I made that criterion No. 3 on The Divine Seven (D7) and then No. 1 on The SciMark Seven (S7) for this reason, and I used some key words to try to help myself and others avoid the tendency to call things "problems" that aren't really problems:
- On the D7: Items must "solve a perceived problem that doesn't already have a good-enough solution."
- On the S7: Items must be "needed enough to generate the impulse to buy."
Still, deciding if a product meets these criteria is ultimately a judgment call that is colored by what you, and people you know, are willing to view as a "real" problem. That's the challenge with perception, and a good case for being careful whom you ask about a product ... or how many you ask, and in what way.
For example, people in the same meeting or office tend to experience what James Surowiecki called "an information cascade," which Wikipedia describes as follows:
Where choices are visible and made in sequence ... only the first few decision makers gain anything by contemplating the choices available: once past decisions have become sufficiently informative, it pays for later decision makers to simply copy those around them. This can lead to fragile social outcomes.
Or fragile DRTV outcomes. I will write more about Surowiecki's research and its application to DRTV in another post some day. It's fascinating stuff. In the meantime, I highly recommend his book, The Wisdom of Crowds.
