The Warshaw Curve

"AN EARLY CLUE TO THE NEW DIRECTION?"

When thinking about trends my mind always wanders to one of my favorite scenes from the Beatles' first feature film, "A Hard Days Night" (1964).

Here's the set-up for this brief, absolute gem of a scene that's all about trends and the people who spot and market them:

Just hours before the Beatles are to perform live on British television, Ringo is nowhere to be found.  John, Paul and George split up to look for him, and along the way each Beatle has his own brief encounter of a strange kind.  George's fate is to become an accidental one-man focus group for a trend-master:

CONSUMER GOODS & "THE CURVE"

Some more folks are beginning to look at "The Curve" as a lens through which to observe consumer consumption in more than just the media space.

Makes sense, as the cost of production and distribution drop, and goods become mass produced commodities in many more areas than just entertainment.

Much more about it on the LEADSExplorer website, which has multiple entries on the matter.  The first of which points out:

Similarities with Infant Mortality and Burn-in distributions

- An infant mortality period with a decreasing failure rate
- Followed by a normal life period (”useful life”) with a low, relatively constant failure rate
- Concluding with a wear-out period that exhibits an increasing failure rate.

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These curves are called Weibull distributions.  Used in Operation Research for addressing production and operational problems.

If you would tweak the parameters you could produce a curve very similar to the Warshaw curve, as there are enough parameters to play with.

So far for the maths.

Other examples of Warshaw curve

Low-End content:
- Flickr or Stock.XCHNG (high quality!)
- Blogs
- Free amateur adult content
- Product white paper of company

Medium content:
- Sony ImageStation has been closed - business model was: “paying” by receiving emails from Sony
- Newspapers, industry magazines with registrations allowing them to email the readers.
- Adult content portal websites linking to many other websites.
- White paper syndications: registration required

High-End content:
- Getty Images
- Newspapers with subscriptions
- Paid adult content
- Paid white papers and market surveys by research organizations: Forrester, IDC, Gartner, Jupiter, Ovum, Bloor, …

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AGAIN, MORE FROM THIS POST AND A FOLLOW-UP POST THAT DIVES DEEPER CAN BE FOUND ON LEADSExplorer.  

OTHER SECTORS FOLLOWING THE CURVE?

Adam Park recently applied the High-End/Low-End/No Middle paradigm of The Curve to the marketing and consumption of consumer products in the consumer electronics sector. It's an area that I've been talking about with some of my clients, but had yet to write about.

As Adam notes on his blog:

If you chart the customer distribution compared to price, you get a bell curve that looks quite like the one below:

 

Flipping the Bell Curve

Problem is that the bell curve is losing touch with the reality. Take cell phones or mobile devices for instance. You can now get a phone for free with subscription to a mobile carrier’s services. If you choose to do so, you can also get a premium phone that will cost you more than 500 bucks in some cases. What’s wrong with this picture? It ain’t no bell curve any more.

 

Now you need a different persepctive altogether! You need to flip the bell curve to meet a new curve: the Warshaw curve.

In the Warshaw curve era, the consumer distribution looks more like two hills and a valley in between. This means that there’ll be (a) land of free; (b) valley of mediocre; and (c) highland of premium.

(More of Adam's observations can be found here.)

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