[editor’s note: This post won me the “customer of the year” award from gDiapers! And a lovely lunch with their charming CEO. Dang, I need to blog more often!!] Recently I found out about a new system of diapering - flushable diaps! This is very exciting to the mother of a 19-month-old. Look, I like the earth and all, but I think cloth diapers and washing them are gross in the extreme. I feel pangs of guilt every time I throw a disposable diaper in the trash. What’s an eco-friendly but lazy mama to do? Enter gdiapers. Found them via parenthacks.com, which is a very cool site I stumbledupon recently. (Have I told you about my addiction to StumbleUpon? No? Another time.)

So, being who I am, I go to their website. gDiapers.com Oops! Whole site’s done in Flash. I see nothing but a little button inviting me to view it. Well, luckily for them I am sufficiently motivated to turn off my Flashblocker and check the site out.

ooooo… cute. Very cute. Bright color scheme. Baby montage. Cool slogans. Fab writing, nice conversational tone. What a way to talk about poop. I’m intrigued. I spend half an hour on the site. What are they? How do they work? Where can I buy them? How much are they? Are they going to trash my plumbing? What does g stand for? What’s the company about? What does fair dinkum mean? All my questions are answered, because despite being in Flash, it’s a well-architected site and things are intuitively categorized. You know me, I’m a bit fanatical about that sort of thing.

So I decide I want to try them. They’re a bit more pricey than my pampers, but, like springing for the organic milk, I’m willing to sacrifice my meager paycheck to uphold my noble principles. Who needs disposable income anyway?

I discover that they are available at the Elephant Pharmacy, which is a wonderful hippy-dippy Berkeley pharmacy on Shattuck - their tagline is “the drugstore that prescribes yoga” and they have lovely marketing too, but that’s another blog post. Anyway I call up Elephant and the price is comparable, plus I get the added instant-gratification bonus. Ok, I’m sold.

I go buy them. Well, to be honest, first I fondle them. I examine the box from all sides. I read the marketing copy. I determine that I need the large size. I decide between the color choices. Then I wander around Elephant for an hour because I’m sick like that. Hey, some gals like clothes shopping; I love to browse grocery stores and drugstores. I know. I’m weird. Live with it, I do.

All right.

Bring the bum-covers home. Check out the packaging some more. It’s got that nice earthy recycled-cardboard feel which is quite appropriate. If it was too slick and waxy I’d be turned off. The colors match the website. There’s a nifty little thin cardboard wrap around the whole box which turns out to be a Handy User Guide (h.u.g.) that you can take off, accordion fold and keep handy to teach your caregiver how to use the things. Dang. It gets cuter and cuter!

Finally get inside the box. 2 diaper covers, 4 snap-in waterproof liners and 10 flushables which look like giant maxi pads. And a plastic stick and a suction hook. I re-read the h.u.g. I reread the box. I inspect each and every piece of stuff in the box. I discover the plastic stick (for stirring the yuck in the toilet so it doesn’t muck up the sewage system) has “swish, swish flush” stamped into it in tiny letters. How did they know I would be looking that closely??

I assemble a diaper. It’s awfully cute. No, seriously. They were bright orange and bright red with a little “g” on the back. They velcro in the back away from curious little paws. I am at this point surprised at the level of emotion I am feeling for a product which a) serves to catch my kid’s bodily wastes and b) I haven’t even tried yet.

This is the power of good marketing. If you can make me fall in love with a diaper … a DIAPER for god’s sake … you have done some ridiculously primo first-class marketing. I mean it.

I am half-tempted to wake my kid up just to put this thing on him.

All right well I may be giddy but I ain’t crazy. It was just a thought.

Boop finally wakes up. I tear his pj’s and diap off. For fun he sits on the potty for a minute. I’m like, come on, come on… Ok. I get the gDiapers on him. Oh. My. God. Is a diaper supposed to be that … fashionable? I swear to you. I left him naked but for the diaper for half an hour because he was just way too cute. I had to show his teacher. One of the other moms comes in and I start evangelizing.

Mind you… this is a product that I have not even fully tested yet! I have no idea if it’s going to keep his butt dry and my rugs clean, whether it will be too gross to flush, whether it will grind my sewer to a halt. No idea. But I’m telling her all about it. She’s an eco-mom. She goes so far as to buy the cardboard-stiff recycled toilet paper!! She uses those nasty cloth diapers. I bet she’d love to quit washing those things. I tell her they’re compostable and her eyes just light up.

Ok. Let’s get back to the point.

You create a product. You research it, develop it, test it, re-test it, go back to the drawing board, etc. Finally you have it juuuuusst right.

Now what do you do?

You go down to the bank and ask them for a loan for oh, say, half a million dollars or so. You take that cashier’s check and you hand it to the absolute best marketer money can buy. A full-service marketer - branding, packaging, advertising, marketing, the whole nine yards. Everything. And then you shut up and you take every piece of advice these pricey marketers give you. Every single one. They tell you who your target audience is: eco-mamas. They tell you exactly where those mamas live, shop and work and what language they speak. They tell you to spend 20K on your website, 10K on packaging development and the rest they’ll figure out how to spend for you. You sit there and nod your head, and occasionally ask them if they need more money.

Six months to a year later, when their viral marketing campaign is spreading like wildfire, your website is making $100K a day and health food stores in 3 states are clamoring to distribute your product and get it into the hands of people like me, you just smile. You worry about how to fulfill all these orders and ramp up your staff. You look at your bank account balance which is now $10 mill and be glad you had the good sense to invest in your marketing.

Oh. And my very very favorite part. This is the one that brought tears into my eyes. (I know, I need to get a life.)

Deeeep down in the box, under all the stuff, there was a little card. You know what it said?

Congratulations!

You’re one of the first. Honest. (make customer feel like part of an exclusive club)
… Tell us, what do you really think (get customer input, make customer feel valuable) … In return we’ll reward you with stuff and you’ll have the opportunity to try new things (incentivize said customer) … REGISTER ONLINE … your special code is …

Now look. They’ve just closed the circle. I started by using their website to research their company and products. They drove me to the store and cajoled me into buying the product with their delightful marketing. Now I’ve bought it … and they drove me right back to the website, gotten my information (just an email address, nothing personal). A second after I registered I got an email signed by the founders of the company thanking me and sincerely inviting me to give them my feedback. This is the way marketing is supposed to work.

At this point, I don’t care whether the product works or not. In fact, I am perfectly willing to climb the learning curve to figure out how to MAKE it work for me. Tear the liner apart and spill the contents in the toilet? Ok. Stir and double-flush? I can do that. Do a little dance and sing a little song? No problem. And you bet your sweet patootie I’ll be evangelizing in the playground, at the store, in my … heh … blog …

All because I’m a sucker for good marketing!

My only complaint is, where were you guys when Brandon was first born? I could have avoided tossing thousands of diapers into the landfill!!

Stay tuned for pictures of this incredibly cute product and the results of the flush-test…

~m

[editor’s note:] I sent the company a link to this blog post in response to their email asking me what I think about their products. They were kind enough to send me a very nice reply. It turns out it wasn’t their idea, they found it and thought it was so cool they bought the rights to it. They seem like really cool people. If you’d like to see the difference between marketing done right and … well, the alternative, fire up your tabs in Firefox and view http://gdiapers.com side by side with http://www.eenie.com. Quite entertaining and proves my point without you having to listen to me yammer on about it.

Oh. And the flush test … passed with flying colors. Photos to come soon. Of Brandon, not the flushing. Come on, people!

~m

PPS - Here’s a couple pics:
Red

Blue

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 1st, 2006 at 12:09 pm and is filed under Marketing, Brandon, Life in Marisaland. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.