With summer holidays upon us, the global phenomenon that was croc shoes will be in luminous evidence in beaches and resorts across the world though its star is in decline if you read the business press – one analyst described the company as ‘zombie like’ – dead but doesn’t know it yet.
As Helen Rumbelow pointed out in The Times recently, it’s a seeming miracle that these garish, ugly, plastic shoes caught on in the first place, but caught on they did, and how. At their height, croc shoes were generating $168 million in yearly sales.
The croc shoes phenomenon is something most manufacturers and retailers dream of and understanding why such a product catches fire has long been debated, perhaps most famously by Malcolm Gladwell in Tipping Point.
While the answers to each case are different and complex, in the day to day world of online retailing many of the secrets of ‘shifting product’ are readily available. Differentiation is an important one. In a market where a product is freely available, at a similar cost how do you mark your site out as the one to buy from?
There are many elements to this but one of the most basic and often overlooked is customer service. You may have the best technical site in the world but does it work for your target audience? If you make life easier for the customer simply by adding a telephone number (see previous blog) or responding to an email enquiry promptly, you’re already likely to be ahead of your competitors.
In Tipping Point Gladwell talks about how it’s often these small and seemingly trivial elements of an idea or message that give birth to an epidemic. While etailers can’t necessarily expect to have a croc shoes on their hands every year, paying attention to the many small details of customer engagement online deliver consistent results over the longer term.