When I was walking the International Home + Housewares Show back in March, I noticed that All Clad was introducing a new slow cooker at the eyebrow raising price of $150. I wondered if anyone would actually pay $150 for a slow cooker. Since several members of my HomeTrend Influentials Panel were at the show with me, I decided to ask them that question. To my considerable surprise, they said that they would consider paying $150 for a slow cooker if they were convinced that it was a much better slow cooker than less expensive ones.
“How would you determine that it was much better than less expensive alternatives?” I asked them. “That is the problem,” they replied, “there really is no way to find that out before you buy. Except for Consumer Reports, there is no really good place to go to find out how small appliances stack up against each other. We’d probably talk to our friends to see if anyone had purchased an All Clad slow cooker. We wish there were a web site where we could go to get product reviews ... like what Amazon does with books. It would be so cool to be able to go to a web site to find out what people think of small appliances once they have had a chance to actually use them.”
I thought about that conversation when I saw a video of an interview with Emrah Kovacoglu, CEO and Founder of Total Beauty Media, Inc. In the interview, he said he launched TotalBeauty.com – which he described as “CNET meets WebMD for the beauty industry” – because there is a huge need for an online resource for beauty solutions and information. He told interviewer BNET’s Dog and Pony show host Zorianna Kit, “Women are just overwhelmed by the amount of beauty products that are launched every year.”
At the same time, according to Kovacoglu, “marketers are looking to reach beauty consumers online ... but can’t find contextually relevant web sites to place their ad dollars.”
Kovacoglu believes that Total Beauty Media sits at the intersection of the needs of beauty products consumers and beauty products marketers. Beauty products consumers are looking for objective product information online; marketers are looking to reach those beauty products consumers online.
I wonder if there is an opportunity to do in housewares what Kovacoglu is doing in the beauty products industry, a housewares version of TotalBeauty.com.
I have no doubt that there is a need from a consumer standpoint. Making a decision on what new slow cooker (or sauce pan or vacuum cleaner) to buy can be as overwhelming as making the decision on what new moisturizer to buy.
I wonder if there is a need from a housewares marketer standpoint. Are housewares manufacturers looking to reach housewares consumers online and not finding, as Kovacoglu put it, “contextually relevant web sites to place their ad dollars?”
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