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Researchers Study "Harbingers of Failure," Consumers Who Habitually Pick Losers
AmiMoJo writes: Is your favorite TV show always getting cancelled? Did you love Crystal Pepsi? Were you an early adopter of the Zune? If you answered yes to these questions, researchers say you might be a "Harbinger of Failure." In a study published in the Journal of Marketing Research, researchers identified a group of consumers whose preferences can predict products that will fail. “Certain customers systematically purchase new products that prove unsuccessful,” wrote the study authors. “Their early adoption of a new product is a strong signal that a product will fail.”
An online summary of a newspaper pay-walled newspaper reporting on an article... quoting the original with sentences like "At least, according to a group of researchers ..." and "n a study published in the Journal of Marketing Research, researchers ...".
Anyone have an actual link to the actual paper? I have a nagging suspicion that this may actually be an artifact of how the analysis is done.
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Maybe those "harbingers of failure" are just people who are a bit more persistent in their choices and less fickle, or they are the normal ones: people who pick stuff because they like it, not because their friends do. If a large majority of the population are dedicated followers of fashion, then the remaining group will be over-repesented amongst the buyers of unfashionable items. Watching that group is a great way to predict failure after the fact: if you see a large portions of "harbingers" buying your stuff, then you are probably already looking at slumping sales. That group does not flock to failing products, they are simply the ones left over after the rest has moved on.
A better way to predict success is to do what some companies are already doing: watch who sets the trend, and follow them.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Is this just another term for hipsters? People who seek out things that everyone else has dismissed for (usually) good reasons.
No. Because the "good reason" usually is "most people aren't doing that anymore." The article is about things that *never* become cool, not things that were cool in grandpa's day.
The real problem with being a hipster is that the ideal of non-conformity is inconsistent with the idea of fashion.
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Hipsters are the leading edge of sweet FA. They move in on existing microcultures, not because they are actually interested in what they center around, but because they perceive it to be cool. And then proceed to ruin it for the existing members of that culture. It's why they are universally despised and hated, and rightly so.
The point of the article is that the same people constantly prove to be early adopters of products that don't succeed in the market.
Family Guy and Firefly were more or less sabotaged by politics. The reason Family Guy came back was Fox executives looked at the sales numbers of the DVDs and basically said "WHO THE FUCK CANCELED THIS?" With Firefly, they wouldn't license it to the Sci Fi channel under any terms, even though they had a commercial success with the Stargate franchise. Even when they pitched a home run with Battlestar Galactica, they wouldn't reconsider.
Not long ago, Longmire was canceled by A&E for bizarre reasons. It had good ratings and was pulling in a few million viewers. They said "the demographic is too old." Uh, ok, anyone in your marketing department notice that young viewers (ie millennials mainly) are the poorest generation in the market right now?
A show getting canceled is not necessarily indicative of anything about its quality or marketability. A large part of the problem is just the delivery mechanism. If all TV were content on demand, you'd probably see a lot more quality shows and many shows currently on getting canceled.
The actual report is in the Chicago tribune, behind a paywall. Fuck that and fuck the idiot who submitted this non-story.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
My zune still works as well. I use it every day.
Maybe you do but if so you are a good approximation of the entire user base. I'm not sure I've ever actually even seen a Zune in the wild.
Good battery life, large amount of storage.
That's not exactly a compelling argument to buy one over the competing products. Nobody cared about the Zune because there was nothing special or compelling about it. It was a me-too product introduced several years too late to matter. It's most compelling selling point (and compelling is a stretch) was that it wasn't made by Apple. Since people mostly like Apple better than Microsoft that is an argument without very wide appeal. The only way Zune would have had a chance would have been to be technically WAY better than the iPod and it simply wasn't.
Only downside is that you have to use the stupid zune software.
That's a pretty huge downside considering it's basically abandon-ware at this point.
I'm sure the apple fanbois will be shocked that I don't buy a new mp3 player every year when this one still works fine.
Since standalone mp3 player sales are falling like a rock I doubt the apple fanbois you seem to want to sneer at will be shocked or even care. Basically everyone listens to music on their smartphones now. Why carry two devices when one will do the job just fine?
Certainly some early adopters pick products that don't take off, and mathematically some of these will have done it multiple times.
But the article claims that some people are actually predictors-- that their product choices have predictive value for product failure.
Is this actually true? It's easy to select out a set of people who have bought failed products, and then cull out of that set the ones who have not also sometimes bought successful products. But is this group statistically able to make future predictions?
I'm doubtful. Clearly, the way to not select products that don't grab a market niche... is to not be an early adopter. Lots of products fail; if you're an early adoptor, you're likely to be adopting failed products. If you instead wait to see where a product is going before buying-- you never buy products that fail a month after launch.
FWIW, the original article is here:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/pa...
http://www.geoffreylandis.com