USP, Unique Selling Point, is a tough one for appliance producers as they don’t really have any.
If you look then sure, you’ll see some bigger load sizes/capacities, something about AI or whatever, lights, a flash screen and other little things to try to differentiate the appliance they’re trying to flog you from the next.
But here’s the thing, the vast bulk (if not all) of these things are a complete nonsense!
You don’t need them and often other than playing about with such things once or twice they will be ignored. The basic operations will be the same as the next machine.
These unique selling points are, in our view, smoke and mirrors in an attempt to goad people into buying one product over another. Out in the real world they’re not liable to make any difference to the user at all.
Every now and then though something comes along that is “different” and people want but, they often tend to be a flash in the pan as it were, remember dishdrawers anyone? All the rage for a few years then, dead! Nothing, nobody makes them apart from F&P and they’re not “the thing” they were.
Heat pump dryers they’re a new thing, though not suited to everyone, as we have explained in another article. Induction cooking, we guess, is pretty new to most people.
But apart from that, there are little improvements and refinements on existing stuff; nothing is really new or groundbreaking. We’ll get into why that is in a bit.
The Name Game
So if you’ve no real USP/s to carry your brand and you’re doing much the same as everyone else in the game, how do you differentiate yourself or, if you’re new to the market, how do you get a foothold?
You trade on name and, specifically, name recognition as that and the styles are probably the biggest differentiators that you have.
If you have an old and recognisable brand name, such as Hotpoint here in the UK (largely useless anywhere else), you can trade on that regardless of who owns the brand or actually makes the machines. People that think Hotpoint are good or, buy it as they know the name and associate it with some sort of quality or whatever will buy it just on that alone. Even if that’s a fallacy.
Hence, known brand names are worth big bucks, and the bigger they are, the more markets they’re known in, the more value there is in them.
We’re off on a bit of a tangent here but, bear with it…
This is why Chinese brands will buy up well-known US, EU brands, etc, as it’s way, way easier to rebadge their own stuff and flog it, as, say, Hoover, than to try to come into the market under their own Chinese names and try to get a foothold in the market. And, people don’t think they’re buying Chinese so there’s that because some people really don’t want to buy Chinese goods.
Simply buying known market brands where they want to trade and rebranding is way easier, cheaper and gets near instant results. The alternative is a long hard road that might never come to work as well as they hope.
So paying out millions to buy up some established brands makes total sense to them and since there’s no “USP” as such they can lever other than price, all the more so. They can charge more for a recognised brand.
Where’s The Innovation?
Good question.
We think that for appliances, it is largely as there are several things in the way of any as they all clean, cook or cool in essence one way or another, so the basic “what they do” is largely the same.
You have constraints due to physics in terms of energy use and so on.
You have limitations on size as they all have to fit into standardised sizes, more or less.
You have safety and so on, much of which are legal requirements you cannot negate.
All this, plus more, leads to a point where any real innovation is, at best, difficult, if not impossible.
In the absence of anything groundbreaking, you can perhaps understand why that buying other brands to enter a new market or, expand in the existing one, is the only real route that manufacturers have.
What About Quality?
Another good question: Why don’t producers focus on the quality and performance of their products?
Because it seems that the bulk of the buying public don’t really care. Or at least until something breaks they don’t seem to. What they seem to care about are funky features, headline numbers and so on.
Basically, buyers seem to play Top Trumps with specs, etc, get the best they can for the lowest price, and don’t care much beyond that.
If you don’t believe us, just go out and try to find reviews about the performance of appliances that aren’t anything but press releases or glorified word salad rehashes of those. You won’t find them as nobody really tests appliances outside the maker because it takes a lot of time and is expensive to do.
So unlike cars for example, people don’t have that information or at least, they’ve no way to have what the maker is telling them to be independently verified. So some makers can get a bit “liberal” with the facts shall we say as, they know they’re unlikely to ever get called out on it as it’s not liable ever to be checked.
Spare Parts Then?
It made us all snigger around the office as you know that old saying about life giving you lemons so make lemonade well, one well known brand started pronouncing oh so proudly that spare parts were available for ten years. Just recently.
Yes, the law changed and they were forced to make that so, it wasn’t voluntary.
The point is, it took a change of legislation to force that, read into that what you will. But our take is that, given that the law had to be changed in order to make the all do this, they couldn’t give a monkey and will comply with the law, that’s it.
There are a number however that are as good as they can be, some exceptional but they are few and far between and certainly are not in the mass market pack. Those are producers that care and, care about their customers.
Servicing Has To Be A USP Surely?
You’d think but, nope.
Many of us are old enough to remember when manufacturers were proud of their service networks and support for their products but now, well, not so much. Or at all.
At times, it can be a struggle for people who own some brands just to get service at all, let alone good service!
For many brands, this seems to be a topic that they just don’t want to talk about at all and, when people are playing Top Trumps whilst shopping for appliances, we don’t think it’s a thing that enters they’re head, the thought of “if this break, can I get it fixed”. The chances of wondering if spare parts will be available is likely to never be thought about at all.
We see this at the sharp end, angry customers (at us bizarrely) as they can’t get bits for the hunk-o-junk thing they bought off Amazon at a knockdown price. Guess why it was on Amazon at a knockdown price? Duh.
But no, very few, if any, brands use service as a sales tool or a USP and honestly, with all of us being in this industry as long as we have, we can tell you none of them want to pay for decent service. That’s why it’s not used and rarely talked about, even though to end users when something does go wrong, it’s absolutely vital.
Maybe one day, some brave soul will see that customers might actually care about this and do something about it, but until then, expect not very good service and often a wait time of weeks for anything to be done.
There is no legal requirement on the level of service offered, so they can do what they please.
It’s All Very Depressing
It is, you’re quite right; we’ve been saying that for years, and it’s not seeming to get any better.
The whole point of explaining this is to allow people to understand that this stuff is complex. Hopefully, there are a bunch of factors that play into where we are in the world of appliances and that there’s no clear way out of the mess it’s in.
Without a shift in consumer behaviour, which we suspect can only come about by manufacturers and brand owners doing stuff and/or changes to legislation, we doubt it will change anytime soon.
Our hope is that the Right To Repair thing will stir things up and hopefully lead to positive changes to this industry as well as others but, that will not happen quickly. And makers/brand owners aren’t exactly falling over themselves to comply let alone comply with the spirit of it.
In the meantime, makers and brand owners have very few options when they want a USP other than some flaky claim about a product they may have, or it’s only available at the X And Y outlet.
They can try to innovate and actually come up with something that’s new and different, worthy of people’s time and money.
They can do better or spares, but that won’t exactly set the consumer Top Trumps on fire.
They can offer better after-sales service than everyone else, which could be costly but a lot of people may care, especially if they’ve had a recent poor experience with another brand.
Make better products, but how do you get that through to the people playing Top Trumps?
But apart from that, it’s the old slog or how good your name is and how cheap you can punt the machines out at as nobody seems to be able to come up with a better idea.
Depressing, isn’t it?