The Blog of Burgher Jon

I started reading Brian Solis’ new book Engage on the plane and right up front in the introduction he uses a line that marketing consultants will use to close deals for the next 10 years, “If a conversation takes place online, and you weren’t there to hear it, did it actually happen?  Yes, yes it did.” (pg. 8)  The truth is, every marketing consultant will be right.  The information flood gates are about to open and the world will know every detail of not only your product, but all the other ones on the market.

Brian IS a marketing consultant, so as you guessed his next point was to the effect of, “you might as well participate in the conversation then, and here’s how.”  That’s valuable information, especially for the next 10 years as the mechanism of social media for providing information on companies will be far from perfect (when information mechanisms are imperfect, marketers can manipulate them to your advantage).  The question I want to know the answer to, is what would happen to buying patterns if the mechanism of market information was perfected?

Here’s my guess (I’d be happy to field comments with differing opinions): 

1. Every Market will be divided in to two major categories.  People that care and people that don’t.  The people that don’t care will see every product in the market as the same.  They will pick the one that is the cheapest and they will buy it without wasting much if any of their time.  They’ll be able to do this because all of the other people in the market who believe that all the products are the same will have already identified the best value among the available options.
2. The people that care category will divide in to a larger and larger splintering of subgroups.  Each of these subgroups will represent a specific niche that would like the product to exist a specific way.  This will be the death of the word “trendy”.  The people who really care what their watches look like will be the 10 people with most different watches.  Instead of the people who care about their watch all wearing a Rolex and the rest of us wearing 1000 different brands.

This theory is a simplification of course, it leaves out the concept of varied pricing, among other things, but this is a blog post, not a doctoral dissertation.  This trend will start with the more expensive items and move south (there are already a lot more sites that help me determine what care is right for me then what brief case is right for me).  One could argue it’s already happening in a market like cars.  We’re seeing both flashier, odder high end models AND a plethora of low end commodity cars.  People are beginning to move in to the care and don’t care category and the care category is splintering.

Whether or not the social information mechanism can supply perfect information is another question; one that will have to wait until another day.  The takeaway from this post is, the more perfect information in a market becomes, the better you’ll have to be at defining and serving a niche (that is, unless you want to compete as a commodity).