April 1, 2005
hey, commodity boy!
A familiar theme in various e-mail exchanges I’ve been having recently:
The Long Tail notwithstanding, if you’re in an ever-increasingly crowded market where the (A) the barriers to entry decrease with every passing day and (B) your competition get younger, hungrier, sexier and cheaper than you by the hour, then I’d be concerned.
With the internet [not to mention, ummmm.… WalMart, China etc etc], if you have to compete on price, you’re dead…
Make your product as freely available as possible to the greatest number of people possible? Hey, Commodity Boy, Fetch!!
I should have done a trackback to this and the social customer story, commodity boy. The comments below are ones that I posted on Chris’s site but they really should have been posted here or, as i said, in a trackback to both.
“Interesting debate on over/under supply but here’s a customer perspective. I’m only interested in getting the shirts from hugh that hugh picks out and makes and only the ‘limited’ edition. I could do the jpg thing and make my own but then there is nothing to the story when somebody asks me about the shirt. I’ll talk about hugh, the gapingvoid, suits, blogs, etc. In my articles, talks to MBA wannabees, it will get mentioned.
There is more to it then just the shirt.
by way of another example. i have a collection of Hard Rock polo shirts from the Hard Rocks around the world. I only get them from the places where I have been and ordered food. I don’t have people get them for me nor do i buy them just in passing nor do i even like them as gifts.
If the hard rock offered all the shirts on a website for any store they had, I’d drop collecting them in a second because there is no story, no personal story around the those shirts.
these days, it’s not about price or maybe even supply, rather it’s about buzz and the story behind whatever i’m buying.
The key thing to watch? Assume Hugh gets two hundred people signed up for the automatic t-shirt fix. That’s the entire run. Now what?
Do you have a waiting list for people to cancel so you can get onto the list? Do you piss off 200 people by secretly making some extra? Do you ‘cop out’ in the name of greed/making money and make more while telling the original 200 people, sorry, demand thing.
If Hugh ends up with, call it, 100,000 active readers of whom 10,000 are die hard fans and you have only 200 getting t-shirts with a 400 person waiting list to get into the queue for a t-shirt fix, I wonder how people will define that. Some pundits will say, goofball coulda made more money while others will do a case study on creating buzz.
and everybody will be right.”
(crossposted to socialcustomer)
hugh: i hear what you’re saying; just want to make sure we’re both thinking about the word “freely” in the same way. if “freely available” means “widely” available, then, well, it may-or-may-not commoditize you. if a product is *truly* unique, wouldn’t it only be attractive to a small, unique group of individuals? but, to agree violently with you, if the product is generic, and widely available, and able to be “generically” purchased, without the need for the customer to think about what he or she is doing…yup. commodity-ville.
“meaning” comes from what you put into it. if both sides (customer and creator) don’t have some skin in the game, the “meaning” is…well, meaningless.
otoh, if “freely available” means “available at no or very very cost,” that’s not what i was talking about at all.
(btw…the point that started this whole discussion was kathy sierra’s comment that she would have loved to have the “short tail” cartoon on a shirt when she was at eTech.)
@Rick Segal:
I think there’s a difference between Hard Rock Caf
I’d hazard a guess here that Hugh’s not keen on making a living selling t-shirts, so much as spreading the virus, which this is. And bringing in the “Wuffie” point, in one sense, gapingvoid.com *is* freely available, I’d wonder how many people forward his cartoons, as I myself have done, and how much awareness spreads about hugh, gapingvoid, hughtrain, et al leading, one hopes, ultimately to $$
Commodity Boy is right!
First ya got the guy who wants you to socialize the hughtrain, because of envy, whose idea to spread the meme is to put your cards on sheets, bedspreads, baloons and and clownsuits. Hell lets go all the way and silk screen your cards on the cloth bags that the US donates food to starving people all over the world.
Ya can do a cross license deal with tom, a tshirt with every bespoke suit!
Urich is pissed because he can’t get one at WalMart.
There are some serious problems understand simple english.
Idiots!!
There are some serious problems write simple English, or even copy a name.
It seems you don’t understand the difference between having an order system and giving a T-Shirt you offer to everyone who asks (let’s say, that would be 334 people), and offering something at Wal Mart.
I was criticizing what Rick Segal said: that selling more than 200 shirts would piss people off. What an elitist attitude is that? “I want to be the only one (with 199 others) who has that shirt; if there’s demand from 334 people instead of 200, f*** them.” Sorry, but this is just creating artificial shortage of a product. Of course the situation is totally different for bespoke suits, where supply is limited by work capacity! And Wal Mart is a whole different issue, too.