Tony Sarno20 February 2007, 8:40 PM
The key to success online, say merchants who are making significant revenues from online, is to have a unique selling point. This is how we chose ours.
Our online store needed to give potential customers a reason to buy its products. We settled on providing unique value with funny T-shirt slogans and interesting gadgets that we felt our readers would like. We then went to work creating the slogans and identifying the products to sell.
The slogans needed to be witty and make a statement about the wearers. Our target market – APC’s readers – tend to be technically skilled and often take the role of “tech support” for friends and family, often to their regret.
We thought this would be fertile ground for geek T-shirt humour. The APC staff got together and threw around ideas. The one slogan we had to have was: “No, I won’t be your free Tech Support,” the universal lament of anyone who is regularly approached by friends and acquaintances for unofficial tech support. Another suggested variation of this was “Fix your own PC!” And another was “Fix your own PC, can’t you see I’m gaming?” Eventually, the first one, “No, I won’t be your tech support” made it onto a T-shirt.
Another slogan we liked was “Of course you’ve never visited a porn site,” a reference to the many contributions to our End User column in which readers asked to rid computers of malware find telltale traces of porno site visits despite the denials of the PCs’ owners.
Being fair, in some of the slogans we poked fun at ourselves. Our resident non-geek and smallest member of the team, our chief sub-editor, Melanie Farr, was probably having a go at our appreciation of fine junk good with her slogan: “Geeks aren’t always XXL.” I thought the T-shirt might sell well to women and put it on the shortlist. In the end, it didn’t make the cut.
References to techie stereotypes in popular culture almost always include sniggering about geeks’ obsessions with their computers and their success with the opposite sex. We thought we'd deal with this with slogans such as “Geeks know how to push the right buttons.” This one made into Geek Gear and is available now. A female reader took the bait on the first day of the store’s trading, by commenting: “You're such a bunch of nerds. That T-shirt on pressing the right buttons made me laugh. But I'm not sure it's going to turn you guys into chick magnets.”
Don't know about that. For a while there I suspected that "Helen" might have been Helen Chen, our marketing assistant at APC, but she strenuously denied this.
One of the surprises of the slogan writing contest was the creativity of our art director, Chris Zammit. He coined this beauty: “You + Me = 2.0ooooohh.” It made it into production. We also liked “I’m a computersexual,” which we felt could be a useful term to describe the demographic. If “metrosexual” can make it into common usage on the back of a few men like David Beckham or Ian Thorpe, then “computersexual” would certainly describe a much larger group of people. However, this one didn’t make it.
Below are others that didn’t make it.
- “Insert caffeine here,” with large arrow pointing up to mouth (or head at least).
- "Because I'm worth it." A reference to the old L’oreal ad, perhaps with a picture of a techie with a new computer and heaps of cool peripherals.
- “Your history is very revealing.”
- “Before IT, you are all mortals.”
- “I’m hungry, I think I’ll have some Kernel today.”
- “My Work/Life balance is out of whack – and I’m proud of it.”
- “My best friend is someone I’ve never met.”
- “The User Performed an Illegal Action and was Shut Down.”
- “We anticipate your problems; we read your email every day – IT”
We picked the maker of the T-shirts, Gildan, a US company, ahead of any low-cost Asian-based or local suppliers. We consulted some other e-commerce businesses selling clothing andthey recommendedthis company. Basically, we wanted high-quality t-shirts to carry our brand and Gildan’s gear fitted the bill. The T-shirts are made from high quality North American cotton and manufactured without seams for that little touch of class.
NEXT: Naming the business