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January 10, 2007
I'd buy it!
Would you buy this car?
It's a conceptual design from Peugeot. Is it practical or even realistic? Who knows. But I'm happy to tell Peugeot that I'd buy it. Curiously enough, Peugeot is looking for my vote.
It has invited visitors on its website to vote for a favorite Peugeot concept car to appear in a future Xbox videogame. (The contest site is in French.) OK, so I voted for a digital toy but Peugeot's researchers obviously know that hardcore gamers are also early adopters of leading-edge cars. Soliciting their votes votes helps Peugeot determine which concept cars resonate most with core fans. That voting data helps determine future demand -- a useful dashboard item for company executives who must peer into the future and make expensive bets about trends, marketplace gaps and what people will actually buy.
The simplicity of soliciting non-binding votes from a community of customers to help determine future demand and reduce the risk of decision-making is a foreign concept to most companies, but a few like Peugeot are experimenting with it. Then there's t-shirt maker Threadless, which uses a simple-yet-powerful "I'd buy it" vote function to determine demand well before ink touches cotton.
Here's how it works: All of the t-shirts Threadless produces are designed by its fans and customers. For Threadless to produce a new t-shirt, a fan submits her design first to the Threadless community of several hundred thousand members. Votes stream in on a 1-5 scale. Voters can also check-mark a non-binding "I'd buy it" button.
This is no focus group that says one thing but does another; Threadless has developed a remarkably accurate algorithm that predicts which designs will sell. Thanks to community voting, the company has never produced a flop; voting reduces the inherent risk of launching new products. The citizens of its community not only produce the blueprints for products, they determine their demand for them. (We write more about Threadless in Chapter 7 of Citizen Marketers.)
And that terribly cool new Apple iPhone? I'd definitely buy it.
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This sounds like a powerful way to collect quality, reliable data at a fraction of the cost of many other data collection methods. The limitation is certainly the target audience and the type of products that can be researched; Actually, the three examples mentioned in your post all aim at early adpoters/trend setters/internet savy people.
Not to be published: P.S: I suscribe to your blog and hope you will have the opportunity to visit mine. Your reactions are of course most welcome.
Best regards,
Emmanuel Probst
