Selling By Customer Stereotypes

Saw this displayed on the wall inside a Free People clothing store…

It categorizes their female shoppers into 4 types:

1. Candy (hearts): Sweet, girly, flirty, whimsy, and femme  

2. Ginger (cherries): Sexy, confident, edgy, attitude, and mysterious

3. Lou (baseball): Cool, tomboy, laid back, tough, minimal

4. Meadow (sunshine): Flowy, bohemian, embellished, pattern, worldly

So this is how they stereotype their customers “to be helpful”?

Interesting also that they don’t see that people can be complex with: multiple traits that cross categories or even in no category at all.

Moreover, people can have different sides to themselves and reflect these in different situations. 

Perhaps in an effort to market and sell more, what they’ve done is reduce people to these lowest common denominator of idiot categories.

And what makes this worse yet is that it seems to be based just on snap judgment of how someone looks coming into the store and all the biases that entails. 

How about we look at people a little more sophisticated than this and treat them as individuals, with real personalities, and not just as another empty label?  😉

(Credit Photo: Andy Blumenthal)

Five Types Of Managers

Grumpy

Big Mouth

Showman

Inattentive

The Snake

 

(Source Photos: Andy Blumenthal)

To Follow Or Not To Follow

Twitter is a great streaming feed for news and information, but what you get depends on who you follow.

While Twitter does provide suggestions based on whether they are “promoted” or who you already follow (i.e. follow Joe because they are “followed by” Julia), it doesn’t tell you a lot of information about them except their Twitter handle, short profile, location, basic stats, etc.

A new service called Twtrland helps you decide who to follow by providing lot’s more information and displaying it in an organized fashion–simply plug in the Twitter handle you are interested in knowing more about and you get the following:

1) Basic Info–Picture, profile, stats on follow/follower/tweets

2) Top Followers–Let’s you know who else (from the who’s who) is following this person.

3) Advanced Stats–Provides measures on how often he/she gets retweeted, tweets per day, retweets, etc.

4) Graph of Content Type–Displays in pie chart format the type of content the person puts out there: plain tweets, links, pictures, retweets, replies and more.

5) Samples of Content by Category–Examples of this persons tweets are provided by category such as: famous words, plains tweets, pictures, links, retweets, and mentions.

I like the concept and execution of Twtrland in organizing and displaying tweeters information.  However, I cannot really see people routinely taking the time to put in each Twitter handle to get this information.  Making a decision a who to follow is not  generally a research before you follow event. The cost-benefit equation doesn’t really make sense, since it doesn’t cost you anything to follow someone and if you don’t like their tweets, you can always change your mind later and unfollow them if you want.

Overall, I see Twtrland more as a profiling tool (for research or interest) by getting a handy snapshot of what people are doing/saying online in the world of micro-blogging, rather than a decision support system for whether I should add someone to my follow list or not.

(Source Photo: Twtrland Profile of Sylvester Stallone, Rocky!)

An Infographics Treasure Trove

There is an amazing web site for creating, sharing, and exploring information visualizations (a.k.a. infographics)–it is called Visual.ly

There are currently more than 2,000 infographics at this site; this is a true online treasure trove for those who like to learn visually. 

The infographics are categorized in about 21 areas including technology, science, business, the economy, the environment, entertainment, politics, and more. 

I’ve included an example, from the Social Media category, of an infographic called The Conversation Prism developed by creative agency, JESS3.

As you can see this infographic displays the spectrum of social media from blogs and wikis to Q&A and DIY sites–it is a virtual index of social media today. 

What I really love about infographics is that they can convey such a wealth of information in creative and memorable ways. 

Moreover, there is such a variety of infographics out there–basically these are limited only by the imagination of the person sharing their point of view and their talents in conveying that information to the reader. 

As someone who is very visual in nature, I appreciate when the content is rich (but not jumbled and overwhelming), and when it is logically depicted, so that it is quick and easy to find information.

In the example of The Conversation Prism, I like how it comprehensively captures all the various types of social media by category, color codes it, and visualizes it as part of a overall communications pie (or strategy). 

To me, a good infographic is something you can relate to–there is a aha! moment with it.  

And like a great work of art–there is the opportunity to get a deeper meaning from the visual and words together then from the words alone.  

The shapes and dimensions and connections and distances and colors and sizes–it all adds meaning (lots and lots of context)–I love it!

I could spend hours at a site like visual.ly learning about all the different topics, marveling at the creativity and meaning of the information being conveyed, and never getting bored for a second.