Several members of my family got Snuggies this year for Christmas – and not as a gag gift. When I first heard about the Snuggie, I gave it no respect, dismissing it as the next As Seen On TV product, and I thought other people held similar views. I’ve been discovering more and more that people are just laughing off the commercials and buying the product as a genuinely useful thing, and giving it as sincere gifts.
It’s been almost a month since I stopped selling helicopters, but everyone in the company used (and wanted me to use as well) similar over the top sales strategies. They want to get people excited about the product, and stimulate an impulse buy. And though the helicopters I was selling were actually of pretty good quality (compared to versions of years past), it’s still ultimately something you get for someone for whom you don’t know what to get. Using the bare minimum of these sales strategies, I was able to sell hundreds of the things.
The Snuggie, on the other hand, isn’t a particularly useful product. In my opinion, the Snuggie is the unholy union of a sweater and a blanket, with some of the benefits and none of the versatility. It accomplishes something that nearly everyone was capable of before, but it does so in a novel way that is different enough to be seen as distinct. It’s interesting how keyed in sales people are to the fact that we’re not good at predicting happiness, and how often we fall in that trap.