Corny and predictable presentations work—so as millions pay, pay attention
Inventors and product designers can learn from home shopping’s focus on relatability, tone, and creating an aura of scarcity.
BY JEREMY LOSAW
I have only purchased one thing from home shopping.
I felt a little dirty.
About 10 years ago, around the holidays, I was sucked into a demonstration for a toy called Twister Tracks. It was a set of battery-powered cars that drove around a serpentine track that you could custom build and twist around in different shapes.
The tracks came in rainbow colors and glowed in the dark. I was mesmerized. I had to get it for my kids.
I thought I would be cheeky and just order the same thing from a different retailer to avoid feeling weird about being sucked into home shopping. However, it was only available at the time on QVC, so ordered it.
It was an incredibly fun toy. My kids and I played with it a lot over the years and eventually, the value outweighed any guilt I harbored.
Home shopping is the ultimate guilty pleasure. You sit on your couch while an endless array of products parade in front of you and with just a phone call can land on your doorstep. It is like being a monarch whose subjects parade their wares in front of you to be judged worthy of your attention.
It is so easy to get sucked into the presentations. I often find myself drawn to pause on HSN or QVC while browsing the channels. I often play a game with my partner or kids where we try to guess the absurd color names for whatever product is on the block.
Although it is easy to laugh away, home shopping and the way products are presented is the ultimate physical product showcase. You can learn plenty about how to sell consumer products.
Some key takeaways from home shopping that can be applied to development programs:
Marketing to women
It may seem obvious, but home shopping’s main demographic is middle-aged females.
While so much marketing is directed toward young males who are loose with their wallets, it is interesting to have a whole platform that is so focused on women consumers. It is difficult to find very specific demographic information, but an article from a few years ago stated that the primary customers for QVC are women between ages 35 and 64 with a higher than average median income.
So, one can learn a lot about what product features and marketing techniques resonate with women.
Naturally, most of the presenters on home shopping channels are female. They try to reach their audience in a relational way.
You will hear phrases like, “Your friends will all love it.” “This will be great when you are out with the girls.” “This is perfect for going out to dinner.”
Of course, the product must have some utility, but it is important for the typical woman buyer that it fits into the social tapestry of her life. Even when selling a piece of tech or something that is marketed toward being a gift for the “man in your life,” the product’s utility comes second to how good it will feel to give a thoughtful gift.
Colors are a big subject. Nearly every product sold on home shopping has many color variations, often with absurd names. Even tech products have an array of variants, if only in accent colors.
This shows how important it is for women that a product fits aesthetically into their environment. So it behooves designers to have areas of the product that can be easily customized to different colors.
The pitch
A defining characteristic of home shopping is how over the top the presenters can be. It is cliche to the point that Kristen Wiig and Cecily Strong played out the personas perfectly in their “Saturday Night Live” skit about two women battling to be the next QVC guest host (Season 42, Episode 7).
But as much as we may default to making fun of this persona and doing bad impersonations of them, the pitches work. The hosts are engaging, there is a warmth to their voices, and the cadence of their speech is calm and convincing.
They speak to the audience as if you were their friend or neighbor, which disarms skepticism and builds trust with the audience—to the point where viewers call and drop their credit card number.
Watch and listen to their product pitches. Hear what they focus on and how they engage. Then take the product you are working on, and try to see if you can present it like you would if you were on home shopping. See if you can tease the details out of your product and find the real value proposition that may be hidden in your invention.
Psychology of scarcity
One of the tools used relentlessly on home shopping networks is the psychology of scarcity. The first thing you see when you land on a shopping channel is the price and the number or a color representing how many of an item (or a variation of the item) are left.
Presenters weave this into their pitches—which ones are about to sell out, or that a certain item will not be available again for months. This is meant to whip us into a buying frenzy, even though most everything sold on home shopping is mass produced and not in limited production in any real way.
As product designers, we can use the scarcity factor to our advantage. We can carve out opportunities to create limited-edition colors or variations where we can sell the same product at a premium price.
For example, maybe there is a panel on the device that can be swapped out for different colors that can be changed for seasonal variations.
Also consider opportunities or marketplaces to create scarcity via early bird pricing for a crowdfunding campaign or special pricing tied to a holiday—one of many ways to coax more sales.