Simply Speaking: Shorts #4 - Fencing the Ocean?
Finding the larger value makes you explore the parts. Not the other way around, writes Shubhranshu Singh in this week's Simply Speaking Short.
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Fencing the ocean: How ego drives internet model decisions that destroy value
Dividers don’t get the digital world.
Multipliers do.
Those who try to replicate offline department style turfs on the internet are idiots.
Only dimwits will try to fence a part of an ocean.
As we all know, a funnel is always broadest at the mouth and narrowest at the bottom. That is hardly a deduction of genius.
Yet such idiots, their rallyists and their patrons will divide or redefine and route to market to create a petty walled garden. Incentivisation of buyers via discounts and channel payout may make this inherently flawed model seem like it is a success even as it is failing!
Why is a broad cohort important?
Broad recommendations reduce noise, steering us toward the good stuff. And they're comforting, too. An acknowledged best seller provides a safe, socially vetted bet. The larger the procession, the higher the perceived value of the destination. As a result, we march with the crowd toward the books, songs, restaurants, or gadgets that are top of the charts. As we do so, birds of a feather flock together.
Well, it helps to have friends.
When a friend recommends a book, we are more likely to give it a chance. If we hear a new restaurant gave someone stomach cramps, we go elsewhere. If a colleague hates her laptop, we'll make sure to order the competing brand.
In a crowded field of offerings, we ask, we observe, we listen.
The ‘offline plus online’ model works because the topology of the Web limits our ability to see everything out there.
The World Wide Web is a scale-free network, dominated by hubs and nodes with a very large number of links. This large-scale topology coexists with numerous small-scale structures that severely limit how much we can explore simply by clicking our way along the links.
The web (in terms of search ability) is vast yet small. The web (in terms of social connection ) is small yet vast.
The searches we make are based on page ranking and linkages. These links are directed.
Seeing the references in a book will allow you to find the quoted papers. Yet none of these papers could send you to that book, since they do not cite it.
The lion eats the deer and never the other way around…
A hotel doesn’t advertise booking methods. A hotel doesn’t publicise standalone menu items. A hotel sells great hospitality or great value or huge convenience or some such larger value.
Finding the larger value makes you explore the parts. Not the other way around.
The idiots who make small, independent, fenced models of internet based customer acquisition and sales simply don’t get that.
They are desperate wallets walking around to buy respect and burn good money in a bonfire of vanity.
Shubhranshu Singh is CMO, Tata Motors CVBU. He writes Simply Speaking, a column on Storyboard18. Views expressed are personal.
