Are Harry’s or Dollar Shave Club razors better than Gillette? What about Honest Co. soap versus Dial soap? I have no idea, and I don’t have any interest in figuring it out. They are good enough and generally easier to buy, and so they win.
There is, in my mind, a major revolution underway in most consumer hard and soft goods which I call the Good Enough Stuff revolution. As a result, most traditional brands sold through traditional retail avenues are going to struggle to find a foothold in this new world.
The thing to understand is that Good Enough products aren’t purely commodities racing to the bottom. They are a class of products where the end-to-end experience of selection, purchasing and customer service is more important than the product itself.
If you go back about a decade, most consumer packaged goods were competing on more or less an even playing field. If you wanted to sell toothpaste, your marketing involved the same TV commercials as everyone else and the product was stocked in the stores in mostly the same way. The competition was about price, what the packaging looked like, who got the end-cap in the stores, and who could make marginally better product claims to attract the marginal consumer.
Two Changes
Two things have changed. First, the game on product claims and fancy packaging has aged poorly. Rightly or wrongly, years of marketing slug-fests have left me as a consumer assuming all toothpastes are basically the same and pretty good, and that any razor I buy is going to have more than enough blades. The stuff is all good enough and, if anything, even attempting to decide what’s the “best” over any good enough option is frustrating and overwhelming.
Second, the avenues through which discovery and purchasing is happening have evolved and opened up, leaving the playing field no longer equal. TV ads don’t reach me and I purchase almost all everyday products via Amazon or an app. If I am stuck going to a mattress store no matter what, then maybe I will actually try jumping on a few different beds. But if at all possible, I’ll buy online and skip the entire painful experience.
For the first time, for most of these products, what matters to me as a consumer is the entire end-to-end experience of buying their product—not just the product.
This is a big opportunity for new consumer product entrants. Have a good enough product, market it really well, make it easy to buy at a reasonable price, and provide good customer support. The overall end-to-end experience of your potentially even slightly inferior product wins over the traditional players, even when traditional products are cheaper.
This explains why you are seeing a major proliferation of new consumer product brands sold directly online, and it is also a major challenge for all the traditional companies who historically haven’t concerned themselves with anything other than where they had leverage in the old game. All of a sudden their sales are dictated by the end-to-end buying experience which for a generation was someone else’s problem.
The control of the experience you get with vertical integration is starting to win out over everything else.
Selection Nightmare
For most products, Amazon is—of course—becoming the fallback discovery and distribution option. But have you tried to buy toothpaste on Amazon lately? If you ask Amazon for it you will be presented with dozens of options for different variants at different bulk prices from different merchants. Selection is a nightmare, and if you are bargain hunting to try to save a few dollars you are more than likely to end up worried you missed a deal, rather than being excited at the price you got.
So, why Harry’s razors for me, or Honest Co. soap? They are good enough and their websites are easy to interface with as a consumer. And the reality is that while I care about making informed purchase decisions in some cases, like travel and entertainment, there is a big percentage of the basket where it just doesn’t matter.
It is all Good Enough.