New-marketing strategies: turning your customers into your product.
Image via: http://www.flickr.com/photos/endora57/
(I’ve been meaning to write this one for a while now, originally the title of this post was building your business around your customers, but then I realised how stupid that sounded.)
It seems to me that a foundational premise of any new marketing strategy is that you try to reshape the relationship you have with your customers – hopefully turning them into partners or collaborators. However, the next step after that is to see if you can actually resell your customers back to your customers.
We’ve already seen this happening in a bunch of different situations:
Amazon.com uses customer reviews, lists, images, ratings, sales rankings and discussions from its customers as a big part of its “product.” Etsy, like eBay is completely sourced from and sold to its customer base. And, Threadless combines both of these different models to source products, reviews and sales from its customers. However, a bunch of examples that Christian and Sarah found recently, show even more sophisticated ways of selling your customers back to themselves:
Shopstyle.com allows its customers to combine different items into “looks.”
People can then, rate, comment on, email/share and of course shop these looks.
Polyvore.com offers a similar experience where the express purpose of the site is to allow customers to create “sets” or looks. These are then served up with the item as suggestions on how to wear this item.
Kaboodle.com lets shoppers create polls from products they are deciding on to send to their friends to help make their decisions.
Finally Jansport has used Facebook Connect in a really smart way to let shoppers both share what they’re shopping and also see what their friends think about different Jansport products.
What’s brilliant about these kinds of examples is that there’s a recurring loop of both selling to and making money from customers in a bunch of different ways. It’s meta-meta and that to me is new marketing at its finest.