What To Do With A Dull Product

It’s hard to imagine a toilet paper community. Especially one that benefits the client in a big way.

Some products are services just aren’t important enough for a community. If you have a dull product, you have 3 options.

• Build A Broader Community. Do you sell toilet paper? Start a community about bathrooms or hygiene. Your product doesn’t have to dominate a community, it just needs to be a small part of a good one.
• Run A Campaign. BlendTec’s Will it blend? isn’t a community. it’s a campaign. It’s a very clever campaign. If you’re going to buy a blender, you think Blendtec. What can you do for toilet paper? If I’m going to buy toilet paper, what’s going to make me think of you?
• Develop Evangelists. What’s going to motivate your customers to tell others about you? How can you make the telling easy? How can you coach them to talk about you? How can you reward them? Can you run an evangelist program? Perhaps each member can send 50 rolls of toilet paper to a friend every month.

The more dull your product is, the more creative you need to be. For a dull product you can create a community that’s more relevant, run a campaign with high impact for a very short time, or have a big impact on a much smaller number of people.

Comments

[Rebecca]

Haha, this isn't entirely true. People feel passionately about different brands - even if it's toilet paper. Check out this fan site for the Mr. Clean magic eraser (basically a sponge) - http://www.mrclean.com/en_US/sharethelove.do - there are over 25,000 stories submitted.

[Alison]

Another great post Rich! Love the toilet paper analogy. An example to further this theory is that our parenting site has a Home Organisers' group where women come daily to discuss their homes. Each week they have a challenge to reorganise an area of the house (I'm sure bathrooms/toilet paper gets a look in). They also post before & after pics.

This group has been a total success - to the point people sign up to the site on WOM and ask where to find the 'fanatical organising ladies'.

I think this example ties in with your more recent post on 'Two types of community' to some extent.