When is a cube not a cube?

• Kick Start
• 4 July 2008

Photo credit: Justin Alexander

Inventing the Car Cube

Josh: Where does the name come from?

Miriam: My husband Ian came up with the idea when water restrictions started in Sydney. He thought there had to be a better way to wash a car than with buckets. It was initially for cars and the prototype was cube-shaped. Car Cube was a nickname until we thought of something better. When the final design came in and it wasn’t a cube, we had already registered the trade mark. So we decided to go with it.

Josh: The name tells me it’s for a car, but doesn’t immediately suggest it’s for washing. Also, do you find it hard explaining to people that it’s for boats or bikes or caravans?

Miriam: Yes. The caravan and motor home crowd doesn’t mind it being called Car Cube, but the bike boys really don’t like the auto association. We sell it into quite a few bike shops and they say it would be really nice if you could lose the car name.

Benefits of Car Cube

Louise: What are the top three reasons why someone should buy a Car Cube?

Miriam: It’s convenient and self-contained. You just fill it with water, plug it into your cigarette lighter socket and wash the car. It’s just as effective as high-pressure cleaners, but they can actually strip some of the paint off your car and be bad for sensitive parts such as brakes and rubber seals. Car manufacturers don’t recommend high-pressure washers for cars, but people still do it because they love the power. From our research we know Car Cube is the most water-efficient way to wash a car. Even if the water restrictions are eased, there’s still a strong environmental angle, going easy on resources.

What is the website for?

Josh: How effective is the website in selling the product and getting your message out?

Miriam: The main purpose of the website is to educate Australian consumers. As we start targeting international distributors, I also want to use the website to attract and inform potential overseas partners.

Josh: And how do online sales compare to your bricks-andmortar sales?

Miriam: We price the product higher on the website than at outlets. That’s because it’s more expensive for us to fulfil online orders than to sell through retailers. We don’t want to compete with our retailers but, if a customer lives too far from a retailer, or doesn’t want to drive there, they can buy the product at a premium.

Jonathan: So the website is more to drive the traffic through to your main stockists?

Miriam: That’s right. Boosting website traffic

Miriam: What are the best ways we can drive traffic to the website?

Jonathan: Content is king. The more relevant the content on the site is to what people are searching for, the more people will find it and link to it if it’s relevant to them. This is the idea behind search engine optimisation. For example, the standard phrase you use for the product is ‘portable pressure washer’. But when I typed that into Google, I couldn’t find your site. That means anyone in Australia who’s looking for a portable pressure washer is not discovering that you’ve got the best one out there. Search engine optimisation (SEO) can help people find you rather than you having to go out and promote the product at trade shows or trying to get links from other websites. It also comes down to when people get to your site, is the content telling them what they need? The site doesn’t mention any of the three selling points you told us before. Also, you said the inspiration for the product was when water restrictions came in, but you don’t talk about water restrictions or the environmental benefits of saving water. It’s very important when you’re writing the website copy to grab the audience straightaway. The way to do that is to write the copy from customers’ point of view and look at how it can benefit them.

Miriam: I notice a lot of the search engine optimisation people are promoting Google ads, and getting a good position on the right-hand side of the page. Is that a worthwhile investment?

Jonathan: The beauty of search engine optimisation is, it doesn’t matter how big you are, it all comes down to what’s on the website and how the search engine assesses the words. There are many examples of industries where the top results in Google are small businesses and the big expensive ones are on page three because they haven’t attacked search engine optimisation correctly. You still need to do a good job of selling the benefits once people get there. A lot of websites fail by ranking really high on Google, but when you click through to the site it doesn’t sell the product. You and your husband have obviously drawn on a lot of your own strengths to make the business successful. But search engine optimisation is one of those areas you probably need to outsource. It can be difficult weighing up your budget and working how much to pay for things. But you also need to take into account the time and effort of trying to do it yourself and whether or not that will get you a good result.

Overseas domain names

Miriam: We’re talking to distributors in New Zealand, the United Kingdom and Singapore. Should we be buying up the domain names in those countries? That could get expensive.

Jonathan: The first option is to systematically buy up the domain names in the markets you want to go into. I don’t think you’re planning to go into Cameroon soon, so there’s no point buying that, but certainly for your key markets. The other way to do it is just to buy the .com and have subdomains off that for each country: australia.carcube. com or uk.carcube.com. You only have to buy the one domain and then you can divide it up any way you like at a very small cost. The potential downside is you risk other people buying up the domain names in those countries and trying to market on your good name.

Miriam: After we registered carcube.com.au, an American company registered carcube.com and also autocube. com. And they have a page with links to automotive sites. They’ve offered to sell it to me. How much should I pay?

Jonathan: Domain names, particularly .com, can get very expensive. I f the current owners are earning lots of money through the advertising on it, the price will go up.

Louise: The price will only keep on going up if you become more successful.

Jonathan: The more successful you become, the harder it will be to get that name off them.

Louise: Even if you own the trade mark, they don’t have to hand over the domain name. They can’t open up another Car Cube, but they can irritate you by getting the advertising revenue from the domain name and not handing it over.

What’s in a name?

Louise: How attached are you to the name Car Cube?

Jonathan: That would be one way around it.

Miriam: We’re not totally wedded to it, but I guess we’ve built quite a bit of ground swell around it.

Louise: What if you used Car Cube as the name of a product, but then you had another brand that you used for Car Cube and your other products as well? You could choose something where the domain name was available. I don’t think there’s a lot of equity in the name Car Cube. Maybe for the distributors, but you could tell them, ‘We’re still selling the Car Cube, but now the brand name is…’ Especially if you’re going to start merchandising different products, such as a Bike Cube, you could have an umbrella brand name and save yourself a lot of trouble. Sit down and work out what it would cost you to create another brand. That would give you an idea of what it’s worth to buy the carcube.com domain name. Then you can make them a take-it-or-leave-it offer. If they say no, you can just move to the new brand.

Offline marketing

Miriam: We have a limited marketing budget. We do a lot of PR; we target dirt bike, motor home, boating, car and motorbike magazines. We also work the trade shows really hard and get lots of good leads from them. Sometimes we toss up whether to do point-of-sale promotions or get some photography for the product box. How do we prioritise?

Louise: The sort of strategies you use depend on where your sales are and how much you have to spend. Certain media only become effective once you have achieved a critical mass. But when you’re just starting out and trying to grow your business organically, trade shows and PR are a very good way to go.