What RL Marketers Can Learn from Piper Breck

Marketers who haven’t been able to establish a beachhead in Second Life, or any other virtual world, should take a cue from Piper Breck’s women’s clothing store, Crave. Piper and her SL sister and co-owner Bethie Oyen have been drawing the kinds of numbers that brand-name marketers like Coke, Dell, even Armani can only dream about — roughly 32K a day — and all on the strength of five little Christmas outfits in a Lucky Santa chair.

How are they doing it and why do they have the kind of crowd counts you usually see just at the free-sex sims, at least for now? These reasons:

– Massive word of mouth via Lucky Chair groups. (See XXXX for what lucky chairs are.) Group members station themselves in the store and announce each letter to the groups. Those who are waiting around socialize with each other, shop the other outfits and teleport in friends whose first initial matches the letter on the chair and check out the other lucky chairs Crave maintains regularly.

– Great merchandise. Piper created five sexy little outfits, with names like Santa Baby, Santa’s Helper and Santa’s Nookie Cookie, that are fun and a little on the hoochie side but still have everything covered up, more or less. Because they rotate on the Lucky Chair, you never knw which outfit is coming up, and that keeps avies waiting around to see which outfit pops up.

– A customer-directed focus. Besides the Lucky Santa chair, in which you sit on a slightly lascivious Santa’s lap, Piper gives away merchandise in lucky chairs and other giveaway sites scattered around the store.

– Presence in the shop and in resident groups. Basically, she’s there, monitoring the shops and large resident interest groups such as Fashion Consolidated and GIRLZ RULE, where designers can announce new designs and shops, freebies, sales and other incentives. And, she not just in it for the lindens: “Friends are worth more than money or notoriety … Make what you like to wear. If you dont like to wear it, no one else will, and always, always share and give when you can,” she said.

The results: she’s given away about 750 outfits by now, added scores to her store’s announcement group and just opened a second location. She hasn’t compared sales yet, but some of the people waiting for their letters to appear have just bought the outfits instead.

Pics below, top: me in the Santa Baby outfit with skirt from Mrs. Sexy Claus outfit, which I like better; bottom, typical gathering at Crave’s new location, with Lucky Santa chair at far left.