Trial
You might have heard we’re throwing a party tonight at our office.
We’ve done this a few times now, and the coolest part is before the party starts, right after you’ve finished setting up all the samples and you step back to see the sheer selection of products to try. It almost feels overwhelming. Like you’re going to have to sprint through the night to try everything you want.
The anticipation, a least for me, is wrapped up in the fact that trying everything at one of our parties would put you out a couple hundred dollars, easy.
As a consumer, that’s an expensive night. But at party like ours, you’ve struck gold. It’s free.
Most of the coolest brands have limited retail distribution, so the fastest way to recreate something like a Repeat party, even a scaled down version of it, would be to buy that curated list of products directly from brands. Very few of us, though, are going to buy a handful of cases of drinks and boxes of snacks for a night of sampling.
We do, though, buy a handful of new drinks and snacks to try in retail all the time. Because we like to try new things.
This is, it seems, is one of the under-discussed challenges of DTC growth.
While most conversations around growing DTC are focused on combatting the increasing costs of Facebook, finding new advertising channels, and improving retention efforts, an alternative place to explore may be making it easier for people to try products.
Retail isn’t just powerful because of the physical availability; it’s also powerful because the quantity of what you can buy as a consumer is often more wallet friendly than the quantity of what you can buy direct from the brand.
One $5 can is easier to swallow than a $40 case when you haven’t yet tried it.
The challenge here, of course, is that the unit economics of DTC may make this prohibitive. But it’s not impossible. Brands like Agua Bonita and Gooey Snacks are promoting trial and single unit transactions via DTC.
Perhaps, though, the ability to do this means having a tighter handle on the rest of your business. And, perhaps, it means looking at a single unit/trial sale different.
What if that were a marketing expense, on par with your ad budget? What would that look like?
If conversion to full size DTC purchases were high enough, it might be a viable growth lever.
Retail, it seems, will be superior for the consumer in this respect until DTC is able to solve this. In the mean time, there’s always a Repeat party.