Clothing Sales in Second Life

Mass marketing became very popular in the middle of the last century. There were, as far as I can see, two reasons for this. First, the mass production of goods brought down the price making them affordable by a much larger number of people. And, second, mass appeal advertising (possibly due to advances in media technology) created the demand needed to justify mass production. However, before the end of the century, pundits were predicting the end of mass marketing. Alvin Toffler was one of those pundits, if I recall correctly. And stepping up to provide an excellent example of a new way of marketing, Dell Computer started allowing customers to go to their website and customize their personal computers.

Now, lets think about what this means for a moment. The marketing paradigm shifted substantially. In the mass marketing paradigm, product designers created products that can be manufactured in great quantity with little variety. Then they endeavored to convince consumers that these products are what they needed. In the niche marketing paradigm, consumers design products that will be produced in small quantity with much more variety. And nobody has to convince them to buy as they have specified exactly what they want.

But, some problems arise with extreme niche marketing. First, how to do you make custom products at an affordable price? And, second, how do you get the specifications for the custom product from the customer to the producer. As to the first, I can only say that making more flexible automated production lines seems to be the answer. That is not my area of expertise. So, I will leave that to the process control people. However, the answer to the second is virtual worlds and that is something I know a little about.

Next time, I will describe the process of buying clothing in a virtual world that dovetails very nicely with this concept of niche marketing.