OK, I finally bought the bed shaker I was stressing about in a post a few weeks ago. I'd been planning to buy Shake Awake, because several people had recommended it to me. But I went with the Sonic Shaker portable vibrating alarm clock from Sonic Alert Sonic Alert instead. My wife Barbara tipped me toward me toward Sonic after we tried them both out at the Harris Communications booth at the SHHH (Self Help for Hard of Hearing People) convention. Both products are portable, battery-powered digital clocks that you keep under the pillow and which vibrate violently enough at wake-up time to rouse you from even a deep sleep. Other than their quite different designs (one is black and rectangular, the other is a white disc), the main difference seemed to be that the black rectangular one, Shake Awake, vibrated intermittently in an annoying on-off, on-off pattern, whereas the Sonic Shaker vibrated continuously. More important, Barbara liked the sleek flying-saucer design of the Sonic product a lot bettter. I didn't mind the boxier tech design of the Shake Awake, but the intermittent vibrations irritated me, and I liked the Sonic disc design a lot. So I bought the Sonic Shaker for $29.95. But then later at the show I picked up a factoid from some research presented by Combustion Engineering that said intermittent vibrations woke up a higher percentage of test subjects than continuous vibrations. Of course! Intermittent Shaking = Irritated Sleeper = More Effective Wakeup Call. So what I didn't like about the Shake Awake was the thing that might have made it the more effective alarm clock. Luckily, in the first two times I've tried the Sonic Shaker, it's worked quite well. And I've got to agree with Barbara, it looks great. I guess I'm just like any other consumer: fickle and given to purchasing on impulse before I've tried and tested every product. But if you look more closely at the process we went through, there are a couple of interesting lessons for marketers of hearing-assistance products.
First, even though we only spent a few minutes choosing between the two at the booth, I had already spent a lot of time on the web exploring options and corresponding with people who used portable bed shakers. Everyone said both products worked well. So a presence on the web is a must, and both Sonic and Shake Awake seemed to pop up on all my searches. And the good word-of-mouth confirming the products actually worked was a must as well. Equally important is a trusted distribution channel. When I got to the show, I headed for the Harris Communications booth. From past online dealings with their e-commerce site and from references from other satisfied customers, I trusted the Harris brand and knew they would have the right products and be knowledgeable about them. I wasn't disappointed, as the sales representive at the booth guided us to the two products I was already interested in, then demonstrated them for us. So shelf space and share-of-mind with top retailers is extremely important. But at the end of the day, the biggest factor that tipped me to the Sonic Shaker was its design. We spent less time stressing on whether the products would work, because going in we knew from the word-of-mouth that both would do the job. But we simply liked the way Sonic Alert's product looked and felt a little better than the Shake Awake. So as Steve Jobs at Apple has shown time and again, a good-looking, well-designed product often will trump all else.
Posted by David at 04:01 PM on Jul 8, 2005 in COPING, NEW PRODUCTS
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