Category: Long Tail

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Burger King masks and eBay are big this Halloween

Before the internet there was little chance for enterprising types to profit from holiday-generated scarcity. I’m thinking of the Cabbage Patch Kids dolls, which were the must-have collectibles for much of the 1980s, and caused frenzied pre-Christmas rushes at bricks-and-mortar stores. Now there are online markets to help resolve supply / demand imbalances. I was reminded of this as I talked to my friend at BuyCostumes, the world’s largest e-commerce costume site.

Earlier this month I wrote that if you remove the constraints of shelf space dictated by a physical costume store, you see the same Long Tail sales trends that other categories experience (at BuyCostomes, at least). When variety of product is virtually unlimited (pun intended), niche sales can be very profitable.

Conversely, when there is a lot of demand for something in limited supply, not only will you sell out quickly, but you’ll see that product continue through the food chain until it finds its ideal price. Certainly for Christmas items, but also for Halloween, which is now the second largest American holiday in terms of spending.

A fact I was reminded of when I learned that Burger King costumes are big this year.

BuyCostumes has an exclusive deal to sell these masks this year, and sold nearly 2,000 of them over the course of about 6 hours (cumulatively, because they sold them in batches over several days).

The retail price was $39.99. Many who scooped them up immediately put them back on the market. My contact at BuyCostumes guessed they were going for as much as $80 each on eBay and finally settled down to $65, including shipping and handling. Unfortunately, the speculators, plus eBay and perhaps pay-per-click ad sites (see the ads on the Google search I did this weekend) were the only parties to profit from this demand spike.

For several years I’ve been reading that movie theaters are talking about putting their tickets for extremely busy nights up for a higher price than normal, and conversely, marketing their slow nights at lower ticket costs. That day is still a long way off, for social reasons and not technical ones.

Similarly, I wonder if holiday-related e-commerce sites should consider having their own markets for their hottest products, so they can benefit from these demand spikes. After all, oil companies do it. And isn’t a Burger King mask that can be re-sold many times on eBay and Craigslist just as fungible as a gallon of sweet crude?

The only constraint I can think of: Society may not be prepared to have a merchant with exclusive rights to a product take every action to benefit from its popularity. The negative PR implications of an online auction by the seller may be too great, leaving the opportunity in the hands of the speculators and eBay.

You’ve got to wonder. If the frantic parents outside the toy stores of the 1980’s were told there would be an auction for the last 10 Cabbage Patch Kids, and “Who will start the bidding at $100?” … would there be a riot? And would there be a flame-fest from consumers if modern-day eTailers did the same?

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Scrutinizing the long tail of Halloween

Jon Krouse is in a perfect position to help me test a hypothesis about long tail behavior. A co-founder of OnMilwaukee.com (a rare success story among regional online communities), Jon recently joined BuyCostumes.com. This is the world’s largest online retailer of costumes. As you can imagine, the month of October is major crunch-time for him.

Nonetheless, when I instant messaged him the other day to see if I could test an assertion from Chris Anderson, Jon was willing to help. Anderson is a Wired editor and most notably the author of The Long Tail. He contends that for companies with virtual inventories, just about any item they post for sale — no matter how obscure — will sell (i.e., be downloaded for a price) at least once every three months or so. Using sales statistics from Rhapsody.com, he made it sound like this was nothing short of an immutable law.

That’s for virtual inventories. Anderson admits it’s a little trickier for companies with real ones. That’s the case with BuyCostumes. I’ve visited their warehouse, which stores over 13,000 very real SKUs. Yow!.

Companies like this must mark down some items teetering at the tip of the tail before they finally sell. Carrying costs are a constraint that virtual inventory merchants simply don’t have. But the fact is, even real inventory items sell with some price manipulation. Or so Chris Anderson contends. I wanted to know for sure, and asked Jon.

He reported that minor adjustments to price do indeed make the most obscure costumes and accessories sell. Sure, there are the rare dogs, but priced properly, nearly all SKUs generate profits. This is huge, because the number of items offered is a precedent for the industry.

Imagine how many items a bricks-and-mortar costume shop can physically stock. Now consider that at one time quite recently, conventional wisdom was that no one wanted more selection than could be held on a really well-stocked costume shop’s shelves. Or, for that matter, in music store’s bins, or along a bookstore’s stacks.

The web, with its power to categorize, search and suggest, has exploded that myth. Which would mean little to a company like Jon’s if the demand for these products wasn’t so large.

How many sales are anticipated in the next couple of weeks for this humble little online costume shop?

“At our busiest, we’ll be doing 20,000 orders a day*,” Jon reports. Tune in November 1 to see a photo featuring the costumes that my wife and I chose and wore at Jon’s Halloween party, the first in his and Peggy’s new home. 

*It never hurts to advertise. BuyCostumes has major private label deals with major retailers, plus an effective search engine optimization and pay-per-click advertising strategy in place.

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The odds are stacked against this podcast advertising pioneer

I admire what Podbridge is attempting to do. They seem to have taken the lead in monetizing podcasts. I doubt they will succeed, though, unless other conditions change and change fast. Podbridge has created a podcasting advertising network, one that promises to match audio ads to podcasts that you download via iTunes (and, eventually, elsewhere).

Ads would be fed to you randomly along with podcast content. The ads, which would be dynamically stitched onto the podcasts, are served up based on your age, gender and location (such as ZIP code). Nice idea, but …

My skepticism has to do with whether people will volunteer this information (age, gender, location) to receive something that they are currently accustomed to receiving for free, and mostly free of ads.

Much more logical (but logistically challenging) is to follow the ad model that Podbridge claims to be mimicking — that of magazine advertising.

In this alternative, each major podcast producer would receive ad insertions and interweave those ads with their content. This wouldn’t provide the flexibility and customization of regional-, age- and gender-based targeting, but it would talk to people based on their enthusiasms. For instance, DVD rental ads would be placed on podcasts such as Filmspotting (as they are now, for PeerFlix).

These ads could still include Pay-Per-Call ads supported by Ingenio, as Podbridge is currently planning. It’s a brilliant use of this phone-based ad concept, which was first introduced and tested in limited Yahoo sponsored listings.

This alternate business model also allows for the strength of product placement, something that started with the early days of radio and television, and has found a new life as a way for advertisers to get their products in front of viewers who use DVRs to blaze past television progamming’s commercials.

True, this lack of scalability makes it a less-profitable business model, since podcasts are typically today such a Long Tail phenomenon.

But the dearth of consumers willing to opt-in to receive ads makes the Podbridge concept fatally flawed in my opinion. At least until there is a critical mass of premium content podcasters who will only distribute their product with Podbridge-provided advertising. That day is a long way off.

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Mobile marketing of tomorrow is beyond anything you can imagine

Here’s another long post, but I suspect you’ll find it worth the ride. It will paint a picture of what mobile marketing will be like, much sooner than you may think. Actually, it will paint a picture of what person-to-person retail (as opposed to digital retail) will be like, because mobile devices will merely be the means that will take us to this fascinating future.

If you’re a new reader, I need to explain why I write this thing. I strive not to be part of the echo chamber that is current public discourse. By echo chamber, I mean the repetition of the same hot concept or idea until it starts to sound credible. Many occupational blogs (as opposed to recreational blogs), merely convey the industry “news” of the day. Sometimes that’s worthwhile. But other times, the repetition contributes to a pattern of half-baked ideas taking on more significance than they deserve.

My hope is to make sense of what’s happening or about to happen in marketing technology — and occasionally to pass along a juicy tip or two that you can use right now. Rishad Tobaccowala, chief innovation officer of Publicis, put it well. He’s with one of the world’s biggest advertising groups. Tobaccowala was quoted in The Economist as saying, “All of us have been classically trained, and now we’re in a jazz age.”

We’re all riffing, my friend, and I’m hoping this blog will help keep the improvisation going.

Let me steer us back from that digression. I mentioned The Economist, which you must understand is not just a magazine about economics. Although, to use a famous Seinfeld quote, “Not that there’s anything wrong with that.” On the contrary. Living, breathing economics is much like living, breathing history. By that I mean the following:

  • Economics bears no resemblance to what most of us were exposed to in school
  • Economics is extremely helpful in making sense of this furiously changing world

A case in point is the mundane and exciting observations of economist Tim Harford. In his recent book, The Undercover Economist, he sets us straight about Starbucks. We think they are larger and more powerful than they are because they have a location on every corner of major cities — or so it seems. He uses the example of how you cannot pass into or out of Washington D.C.’s Metro Station without encountering at least one Starbucks.

Yet that is proof not of the seductive draw of their products, but of the weak gravitational pull that they exert. By contrast, Mr. Harford points out that there is only one Washington D.C. Department of Motor Vehicles. If you have a problem with your driver’s license, you must go there and suffer. And people do. They must.

That’s power. That’s scarcity! Conversely, Starbucks knows that the majority of coffee drinkers are quite fickle about where they buy their coffee. It just so happens that Starbucks is big enough to buy up those scarce good locations so that they consistently arrive in our faces when we round the next corner.

The scarcity is not in the lattes and cappuccinos, but in the prime locations from which they are proffered. This is why, he asserts, Starbucks is not nearly as wealthy, in relative terms, as the merchants of those selling opportunities — namely, the landlords who rent to Starbucks and the property owners and brokers who sell to Starbucks. A validation of this theory can be found in a recent New York Times article about the proliferation of bank branches and the property boomlet that this industry expansion has ignited.

Banks, too, know that they are selling a near-commodity. And so it goes: the tyranny of location, location, location.

Imagine if these industry leaders could say, “To hell with these physical locations. We’re stuck in place while our customers travel around the city. That’s just dumb!” Or more likely, what if this declaration was from non-leaders in their industries? After all, the leaders in gourmet coffees and financial services have much invested in their physical brand. It stands to reason that it is the upstart competitors who will stage the more nimble attacks, just as small bands of guerrilla-fighting American Revolution soldiers sprung out of the bushes to fight and ultimately defeat the legions of lockstep Redcoats.

But how will this assault be staged? I’m suggesting that there will someday be a mobile army of coffee merchants and bank branches. These establishments on wheels will find their customers around the next corner because they will see them coming from ever-changing maps of movements and probabilities.

Why maintain a brand address, after all, when you’ve trained your customers to expect you to show up exactly where and when they need you? Of course, this data will come from the only possession other than our wallets that we dare not leave home without (and soon enough those two will merge into one!). I’m speaking of course of the cell phone.

Already, privacy-protected surveillance is being done on a city-wide scale. You can read of several such studies on the following MIT web site, but I’m going to quote from one such study, about a “realtime” Rome, Italy:

In the visualizations of Real Time Rome we synthesize data from various real-time networks to understand patterns of daily life in Rome. We interpolate the aggregate mobility of people according to their mobile phone usage and visualize it synchronously with the flux of public transit, pedestrians, and vehicular traffic.

By overlaying mobility information on geographic and socio-economic references of Rome we unveil the relationships between fixed and fluid urban elements. These real-time maps help us understand how neighborhoods are used in the course of a day, how the distribution of buses and taxis correlates with densities of people, how goods and services are distributed in the city, or how different social groups, such as tourists and residents, inhabit the city. With the resulting visualizations users can interpret and react to the shifting urban environment.

How cool is that?

When I first saw these maps, which surge and pulse with life, I thought they were interesting but were like many technologies — a solution in search of a problem. Now I think I’ve found the problem: Taking power from the owners and renters of real estate and putting them in the hands of retailers. And in doing so, making life for their customers easier and more pleasant.

I’d love to go on and address the objections that I’m sure you have about privacy, and the ability to move branch locations through congested urban streets. Those answers will have to wait (unless you’d care to ask me in the Comments area — in which case I’ll be much obliged). But for now, I’ll leave you with this thought:

If a retailer …

  • Analyzed aggregate cell phone data about your movements as well as everyone else’s who want the same services as you, and …
  • Anticipated through statistical means where to locate itself to fulfill those needs, and …
  • Alerted you through that same cell phone where they are in real time (e.g., “We’re two blocks away — care for your favorite beverage?”) …

Would you choose instead to go out of your way, back to those place-bound merchants you visit now?

I suspect that this consumer choice is quickly on its way.

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Two good resources to prepare yourself for the next 10 years

Thanks to Seth Godin for reminding me today that many readers may have missed the The Long Tail by Chris Andersonhoopla on Chris Anderson’s long-awaited book, aptly titled The Long Tail. This is an important book for those interested in the future of marketing and business design. It reports on a paradigm shift that we all need to get our heads around, in a similar way that The 1-to-1 Future was good intellectual grounding for what was to come, when it arrived on the scene in the mid-1990s.

You can find other support for your studies on the Long Tail Squidoo lens. And for this resource as well I have Seth Godin to thank. He is the original “squid” of this fascinating and fast-growing user-generated reference site.