As a marketer you never want to become complacent. But when you are the only service in town I can see how it could happen. If you don't evolve over time you provide an opportunity for a competitor to jump into the gap... and that is what is happening in the Vancouver diaper service game.
When we had our little guy we started cloth diapering with a service. Our objective was to cloth diaper part time and we really had no clue what to buy or if we would like it. So we started with a service to make sure we liked cloth diapering and to give us some time to get used to what was necessary. The only game in town at the time was Diapers Naturally. I heard about them through word of mouth and tried to find them online. I really looked hard to find somebody online that would let me look at what they had to offer. With no web presence we had to phone. They happily mailed us a brochure and information. We found their service great, price reasonable and very convenient. The only downside was that they only had 2 styles of diapers - pre folds, and contoured. Neither of which were fitted diapers and as our guy got bigger that wasn't convenient anymore (just didn't contain the necessary mess nor was the material thick enough to hold much pee either).
So after buying a couple of different CD styles to try, we went out on our own after 4 months.
Now Happy Nappy has come to Vancouver (and Victoria and Calgary). They are more expensive, but they offer thicker fitted diapers (very similar to what we use at home). They are online. They advertise. They make it easy for you to buy their service.
I believe that Diapers Naturally has a lot of commercial business (mostly the hospitals) and residential customers may not be their priority. But a mailed brochure, that offers a referal program, will not allow them to compete with a more vocal competitor - who in my mind has a superior diaper product. Diapers Naturally may not be losing existing customers, but they are most certainly losing potential customers. And as cloth diapering continues to increase in popularity they will likely lose more of their market share.
No matter how happy I was with Diapers Naturally. If I was to do it again, I'd go with Happy Nappy. In fact if Happy Nappy had been around when we stared out we might have never gone out on our own (and the marketer in me can't deny keeping existing customers is easier more and profitable).
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Does Diapers Naturally have commercial business? All the diapers I've seen in hospitals (and I was a candy striper on a Pediatrics ward stocking diapers as a teenager) are disposables.
ReplyDeleteEither way, I completely agree with you. I used Diapers Naturally as an introduction, but wasn't that happy with their diapers. I also didn't like the lack of web presence. I think they did well because there was no competition. There are things you can get away with when you're the only game in town, and now that they're not they're going to have to adapt quickly or they'll lose out.
Some of the hospitals like St. Paul's use cloth.
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