« Negotiating: Think Win-Win, Not Winner Takes All | Main | Take a Tip from The Container Store: Treat Every Customer Like a Thirsty Man in a Desert »
Giving Your Customers a Product Vote
Should you give your customers a vote about the merchandise in your store? Consider this:
A recent article on entrepreneur.com called Vote For Art: Democratizing Collegiate Apparel, tells the story of a young entrepreneur named Jeremy Parker (he's 24-years-old) who has broken into the lucrative collegiate licensing category in the States in a unique way. VoteforArt.com partners with universities and colleges, and through it students at these institutions vote for T-shirt designs created by peers, which will, in turn, by sold in their campus stores. Parker's impetus for creating VoteforArt.com was his own visit to a university campus, where he couldn't find a T-shirt with a design he liked. Why not, he thought, combine crowdsourcing and licensing and let the people who actually purchase the merchandise do the designing and make the selection.
Reading the article, I wondered what other retail applications this "democratizing" might have. Would it be good business for a retailer in a tourist area to hold a T-shirt design contest and let customers determine the winning design? Could a customer vote help you narrow down your choices of product in any given category? Customers have always voted with their dollars but it's an after-the-fact vote. What would happen if they got to vote for something that you didn't yet carry in your store? Just an idea.
TrackBack
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://bloggt.gifts-and-tablewares.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-t.cgi/106
Lori Smith, , Editor-in-Chief
Lori Smith is the editor of Gifts and Tablewares, Canada's premiere gifts and tablewares magazine. Written for retailers of gifts, tablewares, housewares, stationery and home furnishing accessories, its objective is to help readers increase their sales and run their businesses more profitably by providing information on new products, merchandising, small business management, customer service, consumer behavior and industry news. The magazine is published six times a year by BIG Magazines, LP, a leading Canadian information company.
Search
About
This page contains a single entry from the blog posted on February 8, 2010 4:51 PM.
The previous post in this blog was Negotiating: Think Win-Win, Not Winner Takes All .
The next post in this blog is Take a Tip from The Container Store: Treat Every Customer Like a Thirsty Man in a Desert.
Many more can be found on the main index page or by looking through the archives.