This morning I was idling on the Internet when I saw a clip of an MMA fight between all-time great Fedor Emelianenko and all-time loudmouth Chael Sonnen.
In the clip, Sonnen managed to get Emelianenko on the ground. Sonnen then did some fancy/silly move to get himself in trouble, with Emelianenko on top, raining punches down on Sonnen’s head.
But what really had me transfixed was looking at the ad on Sonnen’s shorts. It read:
DUDE WIPES
Dude wipes? It turns out to be a real thing. Disposable wet wipes for men, in masculine black packaging.
My first impression was that calling your intimate hygiene product “wipes” is already emasculating, and defeats all the manly branding.
But apparently I’m wrong. DUDE Wipes is a successful business. As proof:
They have many offers on their site beyond just wipes (DUDE bidet)…
They have endorsement deals with pro sports figures (pro golfer: “On the golf course and off it, I’m taking it to the hole with DUDE Wipes”)…
And on Amazon, various bundles of DUDE wipes have tens of thousands of reviews, almost all five-star, though with some caveats (“The wife is always reluctant to have them in the guest bath when we have company because of the, as she puts it, sophomoric name and black package”).
This brought to mind my long-simmering idea to create a business by taking a consumable product and applying it to an affinity or identity group.
The usual order in much of direct response is to take a niche and then figure out, what could we sell to them? What could we create and sell at a high-enough markup and with repeating revenue for long enough to make it worthwhile?
This system clearly works.
But the other way works also, and maybe even better. As Claude Hopkins put it, “It is a well-known fact that the greatest profits are made on great volume and small profit.”
So the idea is to take a consumable product which is a known seller to a mass audience, and brand it for a specific affinity or identity group.
I’ve already seen this done with coffee for Reformed Christians. That brand was called Reformed Roasters, and within two months of being launched, it was making $40k/month.
So why not a line of fine cheeses for militant atheists?
Or air fresheners for QAnon nuts?
Or dog food for dogs of heavy metal heads?
Maybe you say any of these ideas is arbitrary, and much more likely to fail than to work.
I’m sure you’re right. To make this work, you will need good marketing to get your Sunni Soda off the ground.
But if you have capital to invest, I happen to know a good marketer. And if you’re looking for a partner to help you create the next Pepsodent or Palmolive soap — for dudes — then sign up for my email list and then we can talk.