Online Grocers Round Two? Boy, I hope not.
A little more than nine years ago I decided to take one more run at big agency life. I found what I thought would be an interesting gig at the Chicago office of a multi-national working in a strategy group. While there, one of my assignments was as subject matter expert on internet grocery stores. Now you have to remember (if you are old enough) that this was the peak of the dot-com bubble. A time when venture capitalists and anyone else with a few coins tossed them at anything with a dot com after its name. Sock puppets selling pet food were all the rage. And I wound up knowing more about Webvan, HomeGrocer and UrbanFetch than any human being should have been required to know. I like to think of it as an extended marketing penance service.
If you build it, they may not come or they may just glance in your direction as they drive by. Either way, they ain’t buying.If you know anything about the dot com fallout, you will know why chills swept over me when I read Jack Neff’s piece in Ad Age this morning. Now don’t get me wrong. I think the world of Jack and hope I can count him among my friends. In fact we have had some spirited online conversations on topics such as the half life of social media and I believe they have made me a better marketer if not a better writer. But I digress.
Jack’s article was about the launch of Alice.com … an online purveyor of “household essentials.” My instinctive reaction … Great. Webvan again. But I want to give these folks the benefit of the doubt so I did two things. First I signed up for an Alice.com account on the beta site. My initial reaction: Nice from a technical standpoint and putting P&G products front and center helps lend legitimacy.
My second task was to rummage through the old prize closet and find my dated PowerPoint on internet grocers. What a refresher and, I fear, a crystal ball! CPG people, VC investors and plain old folk may be headed down the same old path. Alice.com sounds a lot like where we have been before and if they’re using the old playbook it may end just as sadly. But maybe they are smarter than that.
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