shah8
02-04-05, 04:22 PM
One of the plotlines from the book Jennifer Government is the guerilla marketing tactics of Nike. They have superexpensive shoes that only the upper class kids can afford (and driving lust for keeping up with the Jones), and make them only scantily available and with no constant source of supply. This was done so that when they announced a sequel pair of shoes, Nike can sell them at highly inflated, but reachible prices and also flood the entire regions with the pair of shoes. The first plotline of the books starts of with a couple Nike Marketing guys who recruits a lowly member of Nike to shoot someone for their shoes and increase the trauma, so to speak. Those shoes are literally to DIE for! Limited availability so hurry NOW!
Now, lets compare this with D-Theater and the upcoming optical disk formats. I don't know if it's accidental or not, but the constant and grudging releases of D-Theater tapes is feeding a pretty desperate need to have them, aren't they? I mean, they won't make enough copies for the market at hand, and it's pretty obvious that it would be pretty cheap and profitable to do so. Not only that, no retailer has a regular supply of them. You guys go from one place to the next to the next, but nobody gets consistent supplies of many D-Theater tapes, even though you'd think it's a pretty easy thing to do to make sure deliveries to your retailers are done. Isn't pretty obvious now that many people have had their wives or husbands or better thoughts completely shortcutted by I want Bourne Identity NOW thoughts, and all of this fustration may well be for a purpose? If it was easy to have Bourne Identity, I'm sure alot of you guys may think...eh, it's a good movie, maybe I'll get it later (only to forget about it when the latest bauble picks your pocket). However, now, if the Bourne Identity or Mullholland Dr. shows up, even in quantity, you *don't know* that there is quantity and you allow the buy quick thoughts to rule!
Now, in this spirit of fun curiosity, I began thinking up...okay, what if we WERE dealing with John Nike? What would be his motives? I mean, this is a pretty lousy way to make a profit in and of itself, you see, even if it got panties wet. It makes things unnecessarily hard for everyone involved, for what is essentially a small niche product, right? (Ignore that small niche products often are this irreguler...) Soooo, corporate masterminds at JVC and Fox and Dreamworks and Universal and Artesian (I know, I know, control yourselves, at least until I finish) think ehh, this market is too small, but we don't want to give up on this wave of the future, right? Everyone eventually gonna have to go digital, and that probably means HD in some part of the picture. So...how do we leverage any initial, meaningless position, profit wise, into something that works to a grand scale? Mass Market stuff?
I know I know! Let's do this Disney style! They have these irregular sales of their key movies every once in awhile! Okay, well, this strategy as a whole doesn't work for us, since Disney has kids aiding and abetting their agenda, or do we now? Who else are relatively high impulse buyers? Aaahhhhh....Comic Book Guy. Geeks. Geeks who love their toys and do quite a bit of status buying...The latest nvidia card only for some guys eh? Wait, some of these guys are too smart for their own good, they'll think it through and tell all the birdbrain geeks how to buy this stuff. Okay, we need advocates, cheerleaders, people who will cry out in Best Buy ME WANT ME WANT! We need to make sure nobody has a chance to think of reasons NOT to buy now.
Next problem is what do we send them? HD won't fit on even a dvd9, unless we really make it crappy. We'd have to use tape. Tape is expensive to make, though, compared to pressed dvds. Technologically we'd get outstripped if we commit to a tape format. That's bad, quickly depreciating value in physical assests, while we switch from tape to some kind of optical format. Okay, we want to enter this market, get those brand names out there, but we want to avoid losing too much when we switchover.
Solution: We make D-Theater an excluse item, only a single line of tape decks will be permitted to play D-Theater. What's more important, only a few people can GET movies and other items. The effect will be to create alot of buzz in the major internet chat forums from AVS to Slashdot, from people who are trying to get various tapes that have short runs, even in the very beginning, when one of the best tapes was not produced as much as any other. Rhapsodic praising of this tape, oh, if ONLY I could get that Beauty of Japan tape! Fustrated geeks would be evangelizing through fustration at the object of their dreams not being available. The process goes on with each movie studio producing their own set of limited press runs and have excess supplies go to different places. Okay, I gotta get my Artesian titles from Captain Video, the Fox titles from DVD Empire etc, etc...Now, is that not a BRILLIANT way to increase name recognition of studios? So no matter if they have fairly little profit from the tapes themselves, they've got more profit from the gains in brand awareness!
Long term solution: By increasing FUD, with plenty of extra U, the studios are going to do the big switcheroo. Optical media is going to be much cheaper than expected, and so will the players. They will keep the supply of individual movies a little low, but constant flow in the beginning to attempt retain as much unpredictability as possible. They will also stop making red laser DVDs and force everyone to a new dvd system in which it is much harder to get around all the nice controls they have, for our own good. However, the consumer advocate geeks drives the family media purchases towards the HD version, saying we might not see this title again, gotta get it now, trained to ignoring other factors in purchase by D-Theater...
Profit!!!
Now, lets compare this with D-Theater and the upcoming optical disk formats. I don't know if it's accidental or not, but the constant and grudging releases of D-Theater tapes is feeding a pretty desperate need to have them, aren't they? I mean, they won't make enough copies for the market at hand, and it's pretty obvious that it would be pretty cheap and profitable to do so. Not only that, no retailer has a regular supply of them. You guys go from one place to the next to the next, but nobody gets consistent supplies of many D-Theater tapes, even though you'd think it's a pretty easy thing to do to make sure deliveries to your retailers are done. Isn't pretty obvious now that many people have had their wives or husbands or better thoughts completely shortcutted by I want Bourne Identity NOW thoughts, and all of this fustration may well be for a purpose? If it was easy to have Bourne Identity, I'm sure alot of you guys may think...eh, it's a good movie, maybe I'll get it later (only to forget about it when the latest bauble picks your pocket). However, now, if the Bourne Identity or Mullholland Dr. shows up, even in quantity, you *don't know* that there is quantity and you allow the buy quick thoughts to rule!
Now, in this spirit of fun curiosity, I began thinking up...okay, what if we WERE dealing with John Nike? What would be his motives? I mean, this is a pretty lousy way to make a profit in and of itself, you see, even if it got panties wet. It makes things unnecessarily hard for everyone involved, for what is essentially a small niche product, right? (Ignore that small niche products often are this irreguler...) Soooo, corporate masterminds at JVC and Fox and Dreamworks and Universal and Artesian (I know, I know, control yourselves, at least until I finish) think ehh, this market is too small, but we don't want to give up on this wave of the future, right? Everyone eventually gonna have to go digital, and that probably means HD in some part of the picture. So...how do we leverage any initial, meaningless position, profit wise, into something that works to a grand scale? Mass Market stuff?
I know I know! Let's do this Disney style! They have these irregular sales of their key movies every once in awhile! Okay, well, this strategy as a whole doesn't work for us, since Disney has kids aiding and abetting their agenda, or do we now? Who else are relatively high impulse buyers? Aaahhhhh....Comic Book Guy. Geeks. Geeks who love their toys and do quite a bit of status buying...The latest nvidia card only for some guys eh? Wait, some of these guys are too smart for their own good, they'll think it through and tell all the birdbrain geeks how to buy this stuff. Okay, we need advocates, cheerleaders, people who will cry out in Best Buy ME WANT ME WANT! We need to make sure nobody has a chance to think of reasons NOT to buy now.
Next problem is what do we send them? HD won't fit on even a dvd9, unless we really make it crappy. We'd have to use tape. Tape is expensive to make, though, compared to pressed dvds. Technologically we'd get outstripped if we commit to a tape format. That's bad, quickly depreciating value in physical assests, while we switch from tape to some kind of optical format. Okay, we want to enter this market, get those brand names out there, but we want to avoid losing too much when we switchover.
Solution: We make D-Theater an excluse item, only a single line of tape decks will be permitted to play D-Theater. What's more important, only a few people can GET movies and other items. The effect will be to create alot of buzz in the major internet chat forums from AVS to Slashdot, from people who are trying to get various tapes that have short runs, even in the very beginning, when one of the best tapes was not produced as much as any other. Rhapsodic praising of this tape, oh, if ONLY I could get that Beauty of Japan tape! Fustrated geeks would be evangelizing through fustration at the object of their dreams not being available. The process goes on with each movie studio producing their own set of limited press runs and have excess supplies go to different places. Okay, I gotta get my Artesian titles from Captain Video, the Fox titles from DVD Empire etc, etc...Now, is that not a BRILLIANT way to increase name recognition of studios? So no matter if they have fairly little profit from the tapes themselves, they've got more profit from the gains in brand awareness!
Long term solution: By increasing FUD, with plenty of extra U, the studios are going to do the big switcheroo. Optical media is going to be much cheaper than expected, and so will the players. They will keep the supply of individual movies a little low, but constant flow in the beginning to attempt retain as much unpredictability as possible. They will also stop making red laser DVDs and force everyone to a new dvd system in which it is much harder to get around all the nice controls they have, for our own good. However, the consumer advocate geeks drives the family media purchases towards the HD version, saying we might not see this title again, gotta get it now, trained to ignoring other factors in purchase by D-Theater...
Profit!!!