Is your product an Ice Cream Glove or a Snuggie?

"Get the Slanket if you're serious about staying warm while lying on your couch... Nobody anywhere should buy the Snuggie." (From Gizmodo: http://gizmodo.com/5190557/ultimate-battle-the-snuggie-vs-sl...)

The thing is that I am sure that there are lots of physical products based on more-or-less re-imaging an existing physical product or perhaps taking a clever combination of existing products.

But the thing, I suspect that when these things succeed, they succeed based on marketing rather than their inherent superiority - the name "Snuggie" mmm! This isn't an negative on these things are business plans... But I (and suspect that a lot of hackers) have two reactions to them:

1) I'm a hacker not a marketer, I might think of an idea like a Snuggie but to succeed, the key ingredient isn't such an idea but the soft-focus infomercial, something I'm not particularly adept at.

2) I do want to revolutionize the world, not just sell another Snuggie. By now, I realize this isn't the most common way folks make money in business (Snuggies are) but it keeps the innovator happy, something that perhaps shouldn't be overlooked.

Or in heated homes... but yes, I think your working theory is spot-on.

There obviously are real technical reasons when choosing between a Snuggie vs a blanket, or a Segway vs a bike, or TaeKwonDo vs Pilates, but I think it's naive to think that:

- we choose products/services solely based on rational analysis

- our tastes are not affected by our perception of social expectations

And a sweater/sweatshirt is more 'flexible' since I can wear it outside of the house too ...

No one would carry around a bulky glove to avoid 10 seconds of inconvenience. People most certainly will buy a better blanket to avoid freezing their butt off all night.

They're only comparable if you really put absolutely no thought into the problems they "solve".

IF you can create things like that, that have the wow factor, THEN you're there. But this not the Snuggie OR the Ice Cream Glove, this is the hover board, once you have a real, working copy.

-- There you have a third point the article leaves out. It's not hard to think of Hover Boards, it's very hard to make them. I suspect that Jobs was in the right place at the right time to rise to the level where he could demand that every product be a Hover Board and get that demand often met. That's not always where entrepreneur wind-up and plenty of folks, more folks, make money with Snuggies than with Hover Boards BUT the conditions for Hover Board Success should not be overlooked.

The ice glove is something people in the USA just wouldn't use because no body wears gloves of any sort and the "use-value" of wearing something all the time to protect yourself from something you do only occasionally is negative.

The Snuggie is useful and more importantly, it's use is immediately obvious, in the sense that you use it like a blank but with some added benefits (some of which you can get from a bathrobe, especially wool bathrobes went out of style a while back). The Snuggie is still mostly marketing, since it doesn't just there among the zillions of clothing types out there.

The lesson is that if you have something that offers little originality and value, it's best to offer in a warm, feel-good package that people can understand. Indeed, I suspect the package and the understanding where the originality of the product starts and the rest of it is just ... filler. (note the review that mentions how the Snuggie is simply an incredibly poor-quality effort at meeting the need it highlights).

If the ice-clean glove was really cheap and dispossible, you might be able to sell it to ... ice clean vendors. That might actually be a product, not necessarily good but hey.