Confronting insurmountable opportunities

Caufield on Product, Platforms, etc.

So, I'm a bit sad that this has now been picked up by Rafat Ali and Jeff Jarvis  already, as I'd been all ready to post about it before they did.  Ah well, such is the fate of the blogger who procrastinates.  What is it?  Bob Caufield's exposition on product driven brands.  Really, what he's talking about are product driven experiences - to steal the Experience Economy meme that's been revived by Scoble and Michael Parekh.    Well, maybe that's not fair - he doesn't really extend the metaphor that far.  In fact, Caufield states:

[P]eople replace print with the same content online because they have no other option today.Nearly all online efforts of print companies are little more than shovelware. Media companies have not provided meaningful product differentiation between print and the web, leaving aside the odd multimedia package here and there.

Still, in the end, I think Caufield is pointing out that different platforms can have, and may in fact demand, different experiences.  He states:

Instead of being product oriented, modern companies tend to be brand driven. There are precious few companies left that fuse the two orientations -- think Apple, which defines itself entirely by its products and thus gets a brilliant brand in the process.

Brand logic is the bulwark of defending the status quo. Product logic is where the revolution comes.

When it comes to a war between products and brands, products almost always win in the end.

Interestingly, this jibes with Ken Norton's post yesterday about how to evaluate user feedback on a product.  He makes the point that user research is only helpful when used as an aid, not as a panacea.  His points about "triangulation" are really (IMO) statements that the product designer needs to have vision.  It's not merely about what people say, it's about interpreting what they mean.

A final note on this thought - that it's about vision - comes from Rafe Needleman, who recently participated in a Walden Ventures sponsored panel.

The most gratifying thing I heard was when I asked the panel how they value digital media companies when they are considering acquisitions. ... the focus was on taking risks with companies that have potential for viral audience growth. And that's not a metric, that's a gut feel.

And that's from AOL, Yahoo, the founder of Marketwatch, and Sean Fanning at SnoCap.  An interesting cross-section, and great news for the Internet if these guys are telling the truth.

NYT on Glam.com

So, finally, people are starting to look seriously at community and content in the retail space.  The NYT profiles Glam.com today.  While,  I think that Tedeschi misses connecting the dots on a number of trends, I also think he's correct in giving the eventual thumbs up to the Glam.com concept.  To me, the core trends are:

 

1.  Transactional / monetizing sites are looking to reduce cost of acquiring and retaining customers

• This is behind eBay acquisitions, AOL / MSFT talks
• This is behind speculation that Target may buy theknot.com

 

2.  With a stronger advertising market and overall better monetization capabilities now present,  many analysts have started to place high value on sticky sites that attract a specific vertical

• This drove the valuation of TheFacebook.com ($100MM valuation), whose last round was led by Accel (not coincidentally, Accel also has participated in Glam.com)
• This drove acquisition of MySpace.com and IGN

 

3.  Vertical search sites all recognize that they need to be connected to content / community

• This was featured in Dave McClure's slides from Vertical Leap (Dave runs biz dev for Simply Hired)
• This is also behind Jobster acquisition of WorkZoo, the TripAdvisor acquisition by IAC, etc.

 

All of this says to me that the shopping vertical is ripe for a low cost, community / content play.  Tedeschi's statement:

"Glam.com,  a fashion site scheduled to make its debut today after nearly two years in development, is of a genre not heard from since the heady days of the dot-com bubble: a so-called vertical portal offering articles, user-to-user dialogue and merchandise, all within the confines of a narrow topic."

is mistaken.  MySpace was a post-bubble company, and most of these companies have actually done quite well post-bubble.  (e.g., Gay.com went public, Beliefnet reorganized, but is now profitable, etc.)

 

Further, the quote:

"It's indirect selling. That's a big part of it," said Stacy Lastrina, senior vice president of marketing and creative services for Jones Apparel Group, which includes Nine West, Ann Klein and other brands. "We have to be very careful where we put our brands, and they've done a great job of understanding that."

is exactly what MySpace had done - MySpace was indirect selling.  Bands (e.g., brands) had their own pages on MySpace, but the big labels (e.g., large retailers) do and did not.  MySpace was about fans creating awareness of bands by talking to other fans.  Not clear that Glam.com does that for retail, but it could.

 

However, I'm not sure I particularly agree with Tedeschi and Charlene Li's statement on competition:

But Glam will not have a lot of competition, at least at first. Fashion magazines could set up shop in the Internet, too, said Charlene Li, an analyst with the technology consulting firm Forrester Research, but "they're terrified of losing subscription revenue, and it's a hugely different approach from their regular print efforts, so it'd be a lot of work."

I don't particularly agree that there is no competition (Yub.com launched six months ago, and BazaarVoice is a new start-up that someone I know at a top-notch research firm says will be entering the space soon).  Overall, I think we'll be seeing a reasonable amount of competition in the space, but shopping, along with real estate, are two of the last big verticals that don't really have much in the way of vertical content / community yet. 

Rumors coming true?

So, in all the eBay - Skype and AOL - MSN speculation, a big story is developing that's getting a bit lost in the shuffle.  Trader Classifieds has hired a bank.  This further fuels the story the Sunday Times ran back in August and that PaidContent is reporting now, namely that eBay, Google and/or Yahoo may be among the bidders.