Market of One
Seth Godin writes:
There isn’t a market. There are a million markets. Markets of one, or markets of small groups, or markets of cohorts that communicate. …the idea of monolithic marketing messages to monolithic markets makes no sense. The race is now to be the first mover in the micromarkets where attention matters.
Yes. Wise. I have two riffs to offer on that: one on software, and one on writing.
First, regarding software: with enough information about a given customer’s preferences and behavior, you can tailor software-powered experiences to a market of one. This excites me. The hard part is personalizing the experience in a way that’s palatable: transparent, honest, privacy-clean, editorially clean, customer in control. If you get it wrong, the resulting experience is often sinister.
Second, regarding writing and editing: with enough information about a given audience’s preferences and behavior, you can tailor written content to appeal exactly to that audience. For some reason this scares me. It feels like a trap, “designing” content by reverse-engineering target audience desires. There are whole industries, though, that live by that book. TV and the Neilsen Ratings, for instance.
Hmm. Why do these two — software and the written word — feel so different to me?
It’s hard not getting caught in echo chambers of our own making. Like Narcissus did.
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Steve said,
March 8, 2006 @ 2:45 pm
Funny, I was thinking about your Attention post & questions while I watched Seth Godin in this talk the other day:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6909078385965257294
It’s 45 min long and probably valuable for 1/2 of that time (sucks that you can’t skip around in video & still comprehend the whole, like you can in text :( )
For example from the video: good engineering (your first point) gives you an opening to a conversation with your target user (your second point). But I don’t think he’s worried about the “echo chamber” effect because the point of the conversation is specifically to spark that user into having a conversation - about your product - with other people. So you’re tunnelling very narrowly to reach the excitable user but counting on him to escape the echo chamber.
His suggested cycle:
- build something interesting
- tell people about it
- let them start conversations about it themselves
- get permission to tell them more things later
This isn’t an echo chamber, it’s resonance …
Steve said,
March 8, 2006 @ 2:47 pm
PS notice this cycle is happening with his own product ;)
Rob Gagnon said,
March 14, 2006 @ 4:24 pm
This was what sucked me into technology in the 1990s in the firstplace. I had a vision that the internet allowed you manufacture goods the world never saw before because of it’s unique qualities.
I beleive that a smart organization treats each user as a live relationship of feedback (in a cellular sense) and by watching and interacting you can have them tell you specifically what they want and you can deliver specifically what they want. It’s not wood, metal or plastic (long horizon) with Web 2.0 you can literally ask a visitor: What do want? How should it look? What features? and out of the primordial soup of code create what they need, functions and form factor that suits them: A perfect product. Then as their use increases and more limitations are revealed by the user, the app grows and adapts to their needs (in real time).
It means looking at applications in a different way. We adopted a view of “event based computing” for our platform develpment that essentially said “they’ll tell us what they want, we just have to have the ability to listen”. I am a retailer from way back, you never made money from stocking what you want, you made money from selling things people want.
Unfortunately, this isn’t a terribly good way to raise funding.. it’s too vague. Money loves little clean boxes with sides, ends and tops.
Rob