Selling Water
Great thought experiment: how would you sell water*? This is much like one of the stereotypical Microsoft interview questions of “how would you sell ice to an eskimo?” and is a cool exercise to go through just for fun.
Here’s how I would do it. Put the water in an interesting bottle. This bottle has 5 different openings from which to drink. Maybe one on the top, one on the bottom, and three on the sides at different angles. At this point, ergonomists, environmentalists, and production managers alike are probably freaking out at how user-unfriendly, plastic-heavy, and expensive this product would be, but just bare with me.
Now, let’s include a marketing spin on the consumption of the water. Not only is this a ‘premium’, ‘hot’, and ‘blinged out’ product, but we will push the idea that the opening you drink out of ’says something about you’. For instance, those who drink from the top are traditional, those who drink from the bottom are rebellious, and those who drink from each of the side openings are wild, cool, and bad-ass respectively.
What’s the goal of this? It’s to get people to self-identify with one of the methods. If you can successfully pull it off, you’ll have created an interesting dynamic between the product users where they argue over the best way to drink. Soon you’ll have trash-talk dialogues going about how “top-drinkers are un-cool” or “left-side-drinkers are the $&!^”. This is exactly what you want. Not only do you have to put thought into which way you drink as an image statement, the choice of buying another brand of water will become a huge social detriment. If you buy a different brand, you lose the ability to express yourself. You become a generic person. Yuck! Who wants to be generic? No one does. And that’s the beauty of it.
Take this a step further. Let’s get 50-cent to have the water in his video. Maybe he can even throw in a line like “The realest playaz drink from the right. Damn this water is tight.” Next thing you know, hardcore 50 followers everywhere are buying up bottles like crazy, eager to show off their loyalty and get some street cred. Things only get better when Kanye raps about “I only drink from the top, cause it gets me goin and I just can’t stop”. Kanye fans rush to grab some bottles and drink from the top to show how he’s the man and Fifty is uncool. Now you’re golden**. Everyone who chimes into the debate further boosts the sales numbers. The more controversy you can raise, the stronger the dedication will be, the more water will move off of the shelves.
Now in all reality, pulling something like this off is far-fetched. There’s a number of serious problems with this strategy above and beyond the less-than-serious issue that Fifty was an equity holder in Vitamin Water and thus has a conflict of interest. Joking aside, we see similar things in the consumer world every day. It’s like wearing the Yankees hat with a perfectly flat brim and the sticker still on. Surely it’s not more comfortable, and it’s not as if the sticker has utility value. It’s really an image thing. How about paying 5 times more for something because it has Gucci tags? At the end of the day it just makes the wearer ‘feel’ good. How about shooting out T-shirts into the crowd at a baseball game? You don’t pay for an expensive ticket to catch t-shirts, you pay to watch baseball, but fans love the t-shirt toss and often remember it more than the game nonetheless. How many people wear Tag Heuer because Tiger Woods does? How many people bought a LiveStrong bracelet, not for charity, but because it was the ‘cool’ thing to do?
The learning lesson here is that you shouldn’t always just think about the actual product you’re working with as the thing you’re selling. You could be better of selling an image, a feeling, a status symbol, supplementary activities, or personal meaning. If you can surround the most boring of products, ie: water, with a really super-cool context and get people riled up about it, then almost any other product should give you way more leeway. Instead of getting caught up on the idea of creating the perfect product, settle for an okay one. Instead think about all the little things you can do to get people feeling excited to use your product, either directly or indirectly. Sometimes its the subtle mini-emotions evoked by products that make the difference, not the shear utilitarian value. The more you can get people to use your product because of what it means or how it makes them feel and not because of what it is, the better. If you get to this point, you’ve created personal value for the user, and you have created an arbitrage. Personal value is free to you as the product creator, but worth lots to the customer. And when you’ve made some, it’s like you have a license to print money because what makes you money costs you none.
So, how would you sell a teenage girl MySpace? Would you talk about social networking features and news updates and friend lists? No, of course not. This is like selling water “because it hydrates you”. The magic isn’t in the utility, it’s in the soft experience. The sell for MySpace is in the ‘wow’ moment when she is done customizing her profile with glitter, blinking text, a custom sunrise background, 4 YouTube embeds, 3 celebrity photos, a blog post, a music player bumping, and an ‘about me’ where she answers 100 personal questions. The sell is when she takes a step back and says, “yes, that’s me, and I love it!”. Again, it’s not about utility. It’s about what it means.
How would you sell water? How do you plan to sell your web 2.0 idea to users? If it’s just great features or great technology, you’re probably still leaving something on the table.
* - Credit for this great hypothetical goes to Andrew Chen.
** - If you’re not familiar, Kanye and Fifty have had a bitter on-going rap battle for a long time and fans of each side usually take vary strong stances and are never hesitant to show support.
Tags: Experience, Product, Psychology, Sales, Startups
April 7th, 2008 at 8:50 am
I just stopped by your blog and thought I would say hello. I like your site design. Looking forward to reading more down the road.
Robert Michel
April 7th, 2008 at 9:04 am
Nice writing style. Looking forward to reading more from you.
Chris Moran
April 7th, 2008 at 12:17 pm
What you are speaking of is conspicuous consumption, where the item consumed is purchased more for status than utility. Te problem with it is that you have to understand the market you are selling to *very* well. Around the turn of the century, it was easy for someone to buy a velvet suit and a superfluous walking stick and appear well off; today, conspicuous consumption has ingrained itself into our culture and consumers have become more sophisticated as a result.
For example, buying and expensive car (say, a Porsche) gives the impression of wealth, but it is a turn off amongst different subcultures and ethno-groups, such as social activists. Hummers and other SUVs also exude wealth, and apparently give the impression of toughness, but are a turn off with eco-centrists. So at the very least your product has to conform to current ‘cannon’ of established status symbols. There is no way you are going to ritz up a VW bug to turn it into a wealth symbol, it just has too strong a hippie stigma.
It also helps to have your new symbol build off of old symbols. You may have the most ‘gangsta’ fountain pen on the entire market, but I doubt that any real gangsta’s would care. The fountain pen just isn’t what you use to show off your bad-ass gangstaness. No one cares. There are already established symbols, no one needs another.
There is also a problem if your attempt is too shallow. Hybrid cars and recycled materials appeal to the eco crowd, but they’ll know if your putting them on and making these cars with whale fat (or whatever,) and such attempts will bite you in the butt.
Ultimately, you have to understand your target demographic, it takes more than a 50 Cent word-up to get get hoodies interested in your new product. It requires a deep level of understanding and an identification with the subculture. If people can see the suit behind the mask, or the mask is misplaced, people won’t bite. It’s why things like Linspire, fail; and why Hollywood has yet to duplicate the financial success of the “Passion.” They don’t understand the target demographics. Turning your product into a status symbol is hard work and requires a certain level of genuineness that implies that the utility is still there.
So I suggest focusing on utility.
All these rules go out the window of course, if you’re marketing to kids.
April 7th, 2008 at 1:39 pm
Great thought experiment!
April 7th, 2008 at 6:27 pm
How about setting up water vending machines where the water is free, but any extras cost money. So if you have your own bottle, and just want regular water, all you do is fill it up. But if you want kiwi-strawberry flavoring with a dose of vitamin-C and you need a bottle for it, then you’ll pay for each of these items and everything will get combined for you on the spot. See whether the Freemium web business model works for water.
April 8th, 2008 at 2:20 am
How about getting the government to grant you a monopoly over the public water utility and then raising rates by 200 percent and making it illegal to collect rainwater without a permit? (cf Bechtel vs Victor Hugo Daza)