With the tag line, "Everybody needs an Alice," Alice.com is relying on our collective Brady Brunch cultural memory to immediately communicate this is a site that is going to take care of us the way that Alice took care of Carol Brady. It's about handling the shoppinf for all that non-food stuff that you currently run to get at Target, Wal-Mart or Costco.
The home page says, " Never Run Of Toilet Paper." Now, you can order your toilet paper, shampoo,laundry detergent and a host of other "consumer packaged goods" on-line and you don't have to pay for shipping. Alice.com is trying to do for the consumer packaged goods category what Amazon has done to book buying.
Ever since the Internet achieved critical mass, entrepreneurs have tried to figure out how to make grocery shopping a profitable on-line venture. That hasn't worked even though research shows that going to the grocery store is one of the least favorite household chores. We may say we hate to go to the grocery store, but we're emotionally involved with buying food.
What Alice.com has done is take the emotions out of the shopping experience by excluding the food stuff. food out Instead, Alice.com is offering consumers a place to purchase all of those mundane products that we sometimes forget to pickup like AAA batteries or the stuff we hate to pick up --like cat litter and those heavy bottles of laundry detergent. a
In talking about Alice.com, The Wall Street Journal ( subscription required) says that the new site is really geared to help "the brands" maintain their brand equity by providing direct access to consumer data. In the past, this data has been controlled by the retailers, leaving the manufacturers - like Proctor & Gamble and Kimberly-Clark with little or no information on the people who buy their products. From the WSJ,
"Think about all the pressure[consumer-product makers] are under, from media fragmentation to retailers developing their own brands," says Robert Tomei,president of consumer and shopper insights for research firm Information Resources.Inc. " They're losing the ability to maintain their brand equity; this is a way to re-establish their communication with consumers."
The site currently has about two million unique visitors a month .
Will you start buying your non-perishable's at Alice.com? If not, why not?
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