Snuggie: Smart marketing and a little luck

After a bit of a layoff from posting, I'm easing back in with a topic close to my heart: sleeved blankets.

A few years ago, I stumbled across a revolutionary product: a fleece blanket with sleeves.  Living in an often-chilly apartment, this was the perfect product for someone that didn't wish to sacrifice their blanketed warmth to perform basic arm movements.  It was called The Slanket.

Most people would have probably assumed it was the Snuggie.  It wasn't.  The Slanket has been around for a while, but you would never know it.

So why has Snuggie wiped the floor with the Slanket so far?  The first, and very obvious reason, is price.  The Slanket was originally priced at $80 (they are now priced at $38).  The Snuggie -- $20.  That's pretty much a no brainer.

The second is advertising.  Snuggie had an enormous push this winter with cringe-inducing infomercial-style ads.  As PSFK points out, this may not have been such a bad idea.  The cost of a prime time TV spot has seen a big drop, and Snuggie took advantage of the discounted tv real estate to grab a firm hold of the competitive blanket-with-sleeves category.  Meanwhile, The Slanket relied on press coverage to get the word out.  This is not a bad strategy, especially given the state of the economy.  But with Snuggie on the offensive, what were they waiting for?

The third reason is that Snuggie was able to seize a prominent place in the conversation.  Snuggie emerged because of their quirky and hard-to-miss spots, but they became a pop culture mainstay with the emergence of the Snuggie Pub Crawl.

So here is where Snuggie got a bit lucky. People took the idea of the Snuggie Pub Crawl and ran with it, creating their own versions of Snuggie events. The founders of Snuggie Pub Crawl are not affiliated with Snuggie, so Snuggie didn't have to do a thing, except ship out their product to everyone buying it for an event.  With the help of Snuggie enthusiasts, Snuggie has managed to do something that every smart marketer out there is trying to do: get consumers involved with their brand and turn them into advocates.

So the question is -- would the Snuggie Pub Crawl ever have come about without a smart pricing strategy and some smarts ad placements?  My answer is no.

In Snuggie's case, they got lucky with the pub crawl.  If they had introduced the idea themselves, it wouldn't have worked.  It would have sounded ridiculous to consumers, and laced with marketing.  But Snuggie deserves a lot of credit for laying the groundwork with smart marketing that created the opportunity for the for the crawl idea to even emerge.  People can't talk about your product unless they know it's there.  Just ask The Slanket.

Update: A recent article from the San Francisco Chronicle talks more about the rise of the Snuggie (Warming to the Cult of Snuggie).

Comments

[tsinn]

Very insightful. Great analysis.