Style over substance — My thoughts on Juicero
This is in response to an interesting post by Cheryl Snapp Conner “Learning From Juicero’s Response To A Very Bad Day In PR” — I think she makes some important points about PR so please give it a read.
There are a couple of points I disagree on though:
“Thanks to the sudden wave of attention, many more people are aware of Juicero, which has grown itself largely in stealth mode until the early part of last year. Now they are curious.”
and later on in the article:
“While the short term storm of an exposé article is painful, I predict that Juicero is likely to become stronger and better in the aftermath of the PR tornado.”
When it comes to Juicero I think people are only curious in the way they are curious when they see a road accident.
The PR issue is secondary to the fact that the juicer appears to be an unnecessary piece of modern art and a very expensive one at that.
No matter how you frame things, good PR is not going to fix a bad product.
Let’s break Juicero down as a product:
- You pay $399 (a steal since it was $699) to buy a juicer which doesn’t do any actual juicing (since the packs it uses are semi-juiced already to the degree that you can use your hands to squeeze juice out of them)— how any juice afficianado would accept that as being the same as fresh juicing is puzzling to me. If you want fresh ground coffee you don’t buy partially ground beans.
- The juice packs cost $5-$7 — so you aren’t exactly saving money on materials, how much would the actual fruit cost by comparison?
- The packs use the same kind of chips that printer cartridges employ to prevent you from using anything else — e.g. cheaper alternatives.
- You can’t even use them if they go slightly out of date — for the same reason.
- If you are insane enough to want to buy the packs on their own, you can’t. You have to buy the machine first, that same machine that you don’t actually need to squeeze them in the first place.
In essence what you have is a giant, albeit fancy looking paperweight.
This debacle has nothing to do with PR — good PR is not going to help you sell something that is practically useless, (perhaps there are some exceptions but I can’t think of any right now).
It proves is that some investors will throw money at anything that looks new and sufficiently pretty — perhaps due diligence is dead.
It also shows that that some customers will buy anything as long as it looks sufficiently futuristic and has a high enough price tag — after all if it is expensive and looks good it must be useful right?
That is until someone points out that the emperor is naked, but by then it may be too late.
I suspect that if you are one of the people that has already bought one of these devices the magic of cognitive dissonance and the sunk cost fallacy will ensure that you keep buying packs and using it.
Perhaps that will be enough to keep this company going — those packs aren’t exactly cheap so they may make enough on the markup to survive.
I doubt any other sane person will be buying them, but we do live in a crazy world, so who knows for sure?
