A matter of opinion

Reuters reported a couple of days ago that some market opinion company advises clothing manufacturers to put up their prices. They have surveyed 105 people in Sl who say that they would be willing to pay higher prices.

Following on from that, someone with the deceptively cuddly name of Kitten Lulu has reported on marketing “experiments” in Second Life. This, it turns out, is an experiment to see if customers would be willing to spend time searching for a half-price product, or would rather buy it at the normal price.

Taking the second one first: most people have enough trouble at the moment with teleporting, seeing the the prims around them as they slowly rezz, and being able to read the textures about them. They may read your picks or signs in your shop and go on a magical mystery tour to find the product at half price. If they don’t, you might decide that they have taken a conscious decision that it was better to spend the extra money than get trapped in a far-off sim unable to teleport anywhere else.

On the other hand, most of the clients who bought the HUD may simply not have realised that it was available anywhere else. They may have walked in off the street, seen the product and bought it, and not read any signs or your picks. You may have made erroneous conclusions due to insufficient data. Maybe you should employ the other bunch to take a look at that….
This ignores for the moment the morality of charging higher prices simply because you may, the subject of the Reuters article.

In the real world, people are willing to pay high prices for a number of reasons. They know that manufacturers of items may have overheads such as shop rental, staff costs, material costs and transport, distribution and marketing to pay, and these vary at different places in the market. A tshirt made by a couture house may indeed cost 100 times in overhead what a tshirt from a supermarket would cost.

In SL, people still have overheads. They have to pay for graphics programs, land or rental costs, and the time which they have invested in making products. Other than that there are no material costs, no fabric to buy, no seamstress to pay, no distribution costs to meet.

I feel very uncomfortable about the whole idea that creators should just go ahead and charge what the market will stand. I think that creators should proceed with care. What 105 people tell you about what they might do in theory, is very different from what people will do. There is a rising scepticism about marketing and market research in SL that may well lead to a disortion in results. So even if you do “proper” market research, you can’t know if it is statistically significant until you try it out.
Kitten may find that her customers resent being manipulated in the way that she describes and would prefer to pay a fair price, than get a coldly calculating discount. Maybe she doesn’t care, and the bottom line – an increase in income – is all that matters.
It may be that market research can translate to the virtual world entirely without taking into account the differences in SL… but if that were true then I would expect the big brands like Adidas and Reebok, and their wasted urban desert sims, and Sony, with their empty listening posts, would be a greater success, and in-world brands, like Bare Rose, and Moopf’s store would be less of one.

The challenge for people creating and marketing in SL is to understand how the virtual world differs from real life, and to work with and celebrate those differences, rather than dragging the attitudes of real-life shyster marketing into SL.