Social Selling

Shoppers can be segmented into many demographics but one thing is clear. A large segment likes to follow the herd.

We first witnessed this when the XBox came out. The news showed lines of people waiting outside department stores to be among the first to get their hands on this new gaming machine back in 2000-2001.

The same phenomenon has repeated many time, most recently for the Verizon iPhone. How do brands create such powerful buzz around product release? And why do people so easily get so wrapped up in a new product?

The Internet has magnified a tendency already present in people's psyche. And social networking has further amplified that by exposing the neighbor-next-door's buying preferences.

The herd mentality works but only if a product has some appeal to start with. And it doesn't have to be utility as the iPad demonstrates. It's still hard to pin down what need exactly it fills. Is it a mini PC, a Netbook, a reader, or a planner? Any, none or all of the above? All people know is they have to have one.

What Consumer Preference Analytics by Venalytica attempts to do is separate products by their attributes so a consumer may select amongst alternatives. It does so within categories. A retailer using CPA can measure the impact of marketing campaigns and social media. And they can do it in real time, a necessary feature in the fast-paced retail environment where one day Guitar Hero is the hottest item on the market and the next day is being discontinued.

CPA applies science to measure and respond to human impulses that drive purchasing. And it helps retailers and manufacturers anticipate which products will create frenzies and which ones won't. Add in a healthy amount of social media monitoring and you've got a more nimble and profitable online retailer.

So as the buzz begins to grow on Facebook and Twitter around a new product release, CPA measures the strength of desire for products and their attributes. An example is touch screen. As the iPad craze ramped up, the demand for touch screen and touch pad devices also increased. CPA would see this spike in real time piping data through the supply chain all the way to the designers. The result is more responsive product offerings hitting store shelves faster.

The sales ecosystem has changed with the Internet and social media. Human behavior has remained the same.