🦈 How SharkNinja hooks you

Do you really, truly need a $350 ice cream machine sitting on your kitchen counter all day? Celebrity chefs like Alton Brown have railed against kitchen unitaskers, and sure, probably no one needs an expensive device whose sole purpose is to make ice cream, but one company is making a new generation of shoppers feel compelled to buy just such products: SharkNinja.

The company’s successful strategy includes:

• Releasing 25 new products every year, once every two weeks, produced by a team of more than 1,000 engineers around the globe. 

• A focus on product “desirability,” which SharkNinja’s chief design officer, Ross Richardson, told Sherwood News is “giving you something that’s super cool but you’ve not been able to get access to.” It’s the modern-day must-have tchotchke.

• “Treating every launch as a social story rather than a hardware release,” one marketer told us. In other words, it has to look good and play well on social media — especially TikTok.

• Spending enough money to ensure reach: the firm spends about $1 in every $9 of its annual sales on advertising.

 Add this all together and you have a fancy ice cream maker that launched on a Tuesday morning and was soon selling at an unbelievable clip.

Of course, SharkNinja’s success isn’t just in ice cream makers, but has captured market share in “boring” appliance categories as well. Four in every 10 vacuum cleaners sold in the US this year are made by SharkNinja, and its market share is rising in blenders and more, as this chart shows.

The Takeaway

So far, SharkNinja’s ambition to be the QVC for a new generation is working. The company’s stock has soared more than 300% over the past five years, and it saw record sales of $5.5 billion last year. It’s also obsessive about not just meeting customer demand but surpassing their expectations for ordinary products, as Richardson revealed to us with a fascinating anecdote about how the company improved its vacuum cleaners.

Read more.

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