Latest / Selling on Giants: The eCommerce Marketplace Podcast / The $47.5 Million Idea Hiding in a Bottle of White Paint

Transcript

The $47.5 Million Idea Hiding in a Bottle of White Paint · Selling on Giants: The eCommerce Marketplace Podcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: A secretary in the 1950s took what was essentially white paint, applied it to a problem everyone else accepted as normal, and eventually built a company that sold for$47.5 million.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: What interests me about Bet Nesmith Graham and Liquid Paper is not just the invention.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: It is the fact that she found a simple solution by looking at the problem differently.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: And I think brands miss opportunities like that all the time.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Selling on Giants, the podcast for marketplace operators trying to stay ahead of Amazon, Walmart, Target, and the forces changing e-commerce.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Will Hare, co-founder of Bellavics.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: Today I want to talk about liquid paper, what its origin story teaches us about positioning, and why adding another product is often the wrong answer when a brand is struggling to grow.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: I always assumed liquid paper was some specially engineered chemical that somebody invented in a lab.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: The original idea was much simpler than that.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: Bet Nesmith Graham was working as a secretary in the 1950s when making a typo on an important document could mean retyping the entire page.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: There was no delete key, no Command Z, and no easy way to undo one bad keystroke.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: Graham also painted, and that gave her a different way to look at the problem.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: Painters did not erase a mistake from a canvas, they painted over it.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: So she started using a white, water-based paint to cover typing errors.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: And eventually, other secretaries started asking her for bottles of it too.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, the finished liquid paper product became much more sophisticated than somebody carrying a jar of paint into the office.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: Graham spent years refining the formula and building the business.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: But the initial breakthrough happened before any of that.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: She stopped trying to create a better way to erase a mistake and asked whether the mistake needed to be erased at all.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: That is what I love about entrepreneurship.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes innovation is a completely new technology, but sometimes it is just seeing an obvious problem from a different angle.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: I also think it is pretty awesome that Graham built this as a female entrepreneur in the 1950s, at a time when there were far fewer women getting the opportunity to build and own companies at that scale.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: In 1979, Gillette bought liquid paper for$47.5 million.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: The part that connects to e-commerce for me is how often brands do the opposite.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: When growth slows, the instinct is usually to add something.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: Launch another SKU, create another bundle, introduce another color, add another variation.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: Activity feels like progress, but sometimes you are just creating more versions of a product whose value proposition was never clear in the first place.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: We worked with a water bottle company that is a good example of this.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: There was genuinely interesting engineering behind the product, including NASA-related engineering and how it was manufactured.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: The team was made up of engineers, so naturally they were proud of the technical side of what they had built, and that became the way they communicated the product.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: The problem was that the customer was not an engineer evaluating a manufacturing specification.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: The customer was scrolling through Amazon, looking at thousands of water bottles, and trying to understand why this one deserved their money.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: The brand had a lot to say about materials, manufacturing, and technical details, but the average shopper did not have a clear reason to care.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: Instead of fixing the positioning first, the instinct became launching more colors and variations.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: The message was still unclear, but now you could get the unclear message in blue.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: That sounds funny, but brands do this all the time because launching something new feels more tangible than doing the harder work of figuring out what the customer actually values.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: We saw a similar issue with a beauty brand.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: The product originally had a defined audience and was positioned toward teenagers.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: Then the brand wanted to expand the opportunity, so the audience gradually became teenagers, young adults, moms, professionals, and eventually almost anyone who might use a beauty product.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: The addressable market became much larger on paper, while the marketing became harder and more expensive because the brand was no longer speaking directly to anyone.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: That is why one of the most useful things we can do at Bellivix is look at what customers are actually telling us through marketplace data instead of relying entirely on how the company describes its own product.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: Brands know how the product was manufactured, why an ingredient was selected, and what makes the internal technology interesting.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: Customers tell us why any of that matters to them, and sometimes the two stories are very different.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: One of my favorite examples came from an extra wide sock company we worked with.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: The product was exactly what it sounds like.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: So naturally everyone focused on terms like wide socks and extra wide socks.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: That is the category language, and there is nothing wrong with targeting it.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: But when we dug into the actual search query data, we found something much more interesting.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: People were searching for socks for swollen feet and socks for swollen ankles.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: That sounds like a small difference in keyword strategy, but it changes how you understand the entire product.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: The customer was not shopping because they had suddenly developed an interest in sock widths.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: They had swollen feet, their regular socks were uncomfortable, and they were trying to solve that specific situation.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe a doctor had mentioned swelling.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe their socks were digging into their ankles at the end of the day.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: Whatever brought them to Amazon, the search was describing the problem they were experiencing rather than the product they thought they needed.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: Once you understand that, you stop selling with and start talking about comfort and relief.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: That can change the title, the hero image, the A plus content, and the advertising structure.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: It changes what benefit you lead with and what problem the creative needs to communicate.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: The product itself may not have changed at all, but the way you position it becomes much more aligned with the person who is actually buying it.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: That is one of the biggest tells I look for in marketplace search data.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: Category keywords tell you what the thing is, while long tail searches can tell you why somebody needs it.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: When the customer starts describing their situation instead of your product category, you are getting much closer to the way they actually think, and that can be where some of the most valuable opportunities are hiding.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: Think about the difference between somebody searching magnesium glycinate and somebody searching magnesium for sleep.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_00: Think about low acid coffee compared with coffee that does not upset my stomach.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: Even something like shoes for standing all day for a 12-hour shift gives you far more information than comfortable shoes.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: The search starts telling you the persona, the use case, the outcome, and sometimes even the objection.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: That is why I do not think of Amazon search data as just PPC data.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: It is customer research.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: Reviews are customer research.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: Questions are customer research.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: Even competitor reviews can tell you how customers describe a problem when nobody from the brand is standing over them telling them what language to use.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: The other trap is spending too much time watching competitors.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: A competitor launches a six-pack, so we need an eight-pack.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: They add a feature, so somebody calls the factory.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_00: They introduce another variation, so we start discussing another variation.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: Eventually, every company in the category is making slightly different versions of the same product and wondering why the customer cannot tell them apart.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: I am a Jets fan, which means I have a lifetime of field research in solving the wrong problem.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: For years, the answer always seems to be the quarterback.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: Draft one, trade for one, bring in the veteran, bring in the future Hall of Famer, and convince ourselves that this time we finally fixed it.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: Then the new quarterback is on his back before he finishes the drop because the rest of the problem is still sitting there.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_00: You cannot fix protection by changing who gets sacked, and brands do the same thing.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: Sales go flat, so fire the agency.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: New quarterback, same offensive line.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: Meanwhile, the listing converts at 8%, the main image is weak, the product has 40 reviews against a competitor with 4,000, and the brand is going out of stock for two weeks every quarter.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: Then the conversation becomes how much more we should spend on advertising.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: Advertising is a magnifying glass, not a fix.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: If you have a strong offer, good positioning, and a page that converts, advertising can make that bigger.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_00: If the underlying experience is weak, you are just paying more people to discover the problem.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: So I keep coming back to what Bette Nesmith Graham did.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: She did not solve her problem by making a better eraser.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: She looked outside the normal way people thought about typing mistakes and borrowed an idea from painting.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: That simple change in perspective eventually created an entirely new product category.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: There is a useful exercise for brands here.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: Take your best-selling product and finish this sentence.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: Customers do not really buy our product, they buy blank.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: If your answer is just another way of describing the product, keep going until you get to the actual situation, problem, or outcome the customer cares about.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_00: Extra wide socks were not really about width.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: They were about swollen feet and comfort.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: The water bottle was not really about manufacturing tolerances or engineering specifications.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_00: Somewhere underneath all of that is a reason a normal person scrolling Amazon would choose that bottle, and that is the part the brand needs to uncover.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: Bet Nesmith Graham was not really selling white liquid in a bottle.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: She was selling the ability to make a mistake without starting an entire page over again.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: The product was liquid paper, but the value was solving a frustrating problem in a simpler way.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: Before you launch another SKU, add another variation, broaden the audience, or spend more money trying to drive traffic.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: Make sure you are not just putting a new quarterback behind the same offensive line.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: The operator lesson is simple.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: Understand the problem the customer is actually trying to solve before you decide what needs to change.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for listening to Selling on Giants.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: Follow the show, subscribe, and leave a review if this helped.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Will Hare and I'll see you next week.