Crowdpricing in Second Life
The MobVend vendor for the virtual world of Second Life has been around for about six weeks or so, but it’s interesting enough that I wanted to flag it here. A product of SL user Shep Korvin, the vendor sets prices on its items according to how many people are standing around it at a given moment. The bigger the crowd, the lower the price. You can buy at any time, but once the item hits its lowest price, the vendor sends a chat message to the crowd: you have only one minute to buy at that price before the price pops up to the top again and the process starts all over.
While some view this as a nefarious and lag-inducing promotional tool, the crowds that show up seem to have some fun. (Read more about MobVend at the SL News Network.) What I like about the product, though, is that it takes advantage of one of the unique aspects of virtual worlds: the visual presence of other avatars. Yes, you could do this on a Web page with a counter showing how many people are viewing the page at any given moment, but anyone who thinks that provides the same user experience as standing around in a crowd of avatars is being willfully obtuse. Shep has found a nice way to build an instant community out of shopaholics: imagine a crowd of 20 or 30 avatars going on a flashmobbing tour of SL stores.
This is also a nice example of something I’ll call “crowdpricing.” You could say that auctions in their various forms are another example, though those are forms that serve for the most part to drive prices up as the interested population rises. The difference is that auctions are competitive sale venues where many people are trying to obtain a single item, while this kind of crowdpricing works where many copies of an item are available. MobVend rewards shoppers for banding together. Perhaps the biggest danger is that it could drive everyone to own the same set of items.
Shep sold 50 MobVend units in its first week, so there are doubtless many more out there by now. (They’re available at his »Lucky Chair store« in SL.) I’d love to see someone adopt something like this in the real world, if they haven’t already.
Feeds
I remember that during the bubble there were a couple different websites that had something like this. Heck, the recent MacHeist promotion was even similar, with more and more applications given out as more and more people bought items.
Interesting. Agree that taking advantage of the visual presence of other avatars is important.
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Thanks for the mention Mark - “Crowdpricing” huh? I think I need to borrow that meme for my advertising blurb!
Just to bring the figures up to date, the MobVend has shifted about 200 units in the last month, so the business is picking up nicely :)
It’s interesting that you mention “an instant community of shopaholics” - the emergent community aspect has certainly been a big thing with my previous advertising invention - the “Lucky Chair” (by way of example, “super awesome lucky chair wow” is an in-world fan group with over 1500+ members, ” lucky chair hoppers” (note the leading space, or you’ll never find it) has 1200+ …both of which are *huge* subscription rates for SL groups!). Sadly, ever since Linden Lab b0rked the wildcarding on group search facility, MobVend fandom has been a _much_ harder metric to track … but I have high hopes!
So is this the new camp-chair?
So you TP your friends, force-porting them to come and endure some laggy sim with some product that you want to buy for a lower price and make your friends come and buy it too. They never really wanted it — you may never have really wanted it too, but the idea that you could get something for less was just too powerful. Very addictive merchandising, but leading to stupidity on all accounts.
Instead of using your networks in a smart way, getting tips on good deals or quality products or being intrigued by innovative items, using intelligent groups of people and networks, you fetishize the smartmob wisdom of crowds dreck which is really about stupid drones mobbing around with one or two powerful influencers.
In the end, the merchandiser who gets rich quick off this probably doesn’t have a lasting customer base. There’s nothing like a stupid piece of inventory of osomething I didn’t want to induce me NOT to go to a store again lol.
When I’m told by Juno that if I sign up a friend I can get a rebate or if I buy one I get one free, I feel handled. I never wanted the one, such as to get the other free. I never wanted to bother the friend THAT much to get the $3.50 rebate or whatever.
I think for the full report on this phenom, we need to hear whether at Shep Korvin’s store, ALL the vendors work this way, or only 2, such as to be a loss leader to induce traffic to buy from the other regularly-priced vendors.
I want to take this opportunity to note that Lucky Chair is one of the BANES of SL existence. First, the stupid thing shouts on a radius of 96 m2 and spreads on to all neighbouring parcels. Sure, if you can figure out its owner you can mute it. But if you run rentals and have shoppers at a mall, you can’t expect everyone to keep coming in and muting a stupid noisy chatter like this. If nothing else, Shep, get the damn thing to stop shout chatting or make it be able to be reduced in meters so it doesn’t infect other people’s space.
The other problem is that it induces really bad behaviour. I have scores of idiots constantly force-porting me and trying to get me to come to their parcel when the leter “P” is on there because they use this method of just looking up any well known name online.
It’s a flying camp-chair, that’s all.
@Prok– Lucky chairs that shout are set that way because their owners *deliberately* switched them into shout mode. I place emphasis on the word “deliberately”, because you can only make a chair shout by hand-editing a config file - and the setting within that config file is commented with warnings about the potentially antisocial repercussions of doing so. A similar warning appears in the chair documentation (which folks will need to read to discover that this config option exists!) in which I state that people shouldn’t activate this mode if they have _any_ 3rd parties bordering within shout range. In short, *no* lucky chair “shouts” by default, and it’s a very deliberate - hopefully informed - process that owners have to go through in order to activate that functionality.
But, ultimately, I can’t stop people being an ass and misusing that facility - TBH, I can’t imagine why anybody in their right mind would want to fill their venue with shouty chair spam - but the commercial reality is, if I don’t at least provide “shout” functionality as an _option_ (albeit, I hope, with enough warnings to dissuade all but the most determined moron to misuse it) then one of my cheap, knock-off rivals will. My customers have told me as much.
(FWIW, I tried to be even stricter with the MobVend - by default, those things come out of the box in whisper mode!)
“Flying camping chair”? I’m not sure that’s a fair assessment. Lucky chairs require _absolute_ attention, not mindless camping … you can’t stalk a chair in AFK mode; you need to be taking notice to claim your letter as soon as it pops up, or somebody else will grab it from under your nose. I’ve found that lucky chairs tend to attract quite chatty, sociable crowds of people to a venue - the polar opposite of the zombies that money chairs bring in. And as for “flying”…..?
Well, I dunno, I wonder about this “deliberate config” stuff. Perhaps copies of your chair go around everywhere already configured to shout because they shout EVERYWHERE. And when I IM people and ask them to change it, they are ignorant of how to do that, professing know knowledge of any config cards and such, and seeing the kinds of people they are by their profile, I believe them. So I’m afraid I’m not accepting your tekkie duck on this one — it’s an obnoxious product that drives everyone nuts. You should shut it off completely. Everyone uses it, because they copy the shouting of all casino stuff which is part of what makes casinos such bad neighbours. You should become more responsible with your product and not put the onus on consumers.
Lucky chairs are obnoxious, absolutely. Complete strangers desperate for traffic on their land will IM people they merely find online and shove a “JOIN ME IN X” teleport on them sometimes REPEATEDLY. It’s a really obnoxious sport. People fly around hopping form one lucky chair to another and tping others.
So I don’t care if they are “chatty and socialable” for those on a lot using them, because they are “chatty and socialable” for 96 m2 and the idiots using them are “chatty and socialable” with complete strangers they find whose name starts with “P”.
This is why I ban them from my rentals.
Curious. I just went out for a random tour of active chairs, and *none* of them seemed to be shouting. If you could you drop me a list of some shouty lucky chairs - which you seem to believe are in the majority(?) - I’ll have a chat with the owners concerned and get to the bottom of how these “non-tekkie-duckie” chair owners might be managing to get their chairs into shout mode. I’ll then amend the chair functionality - or, if needs must, my sales policy - to guard against that happening.
It’s not my intention to have a product on the market that clueless/newbie users can *accidentally* shout-spam with, and as such, I’m more than happy to take such actions for sake of good community relations. In truth, on all my travels in SL, I’ve only ever seen two “genuine” lucky chairs that used shout mode (both intentionally)… though maybe I just don’t get out enough.
Anyway, enjoyable though the discourse may be, I think I’d better stop the tit-for-tat postings now, since the OP here wasn’t even about Lucky Chairs. Sorry Walker :)
You say, “I’d love to see someone adopt something like this in the real world, if they haven’t already.”
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