Gates for the “Specialities” – Queens of Disaggregation

Continuing from last week, let us now examine the case for some special guys. I want to continue to use the shopping mall construct, but now we must expand the shopping mall to a much bigger proportion for understanding the next set of entry gates to the Internet.

Let us now think of the internet, not as a single “Dubai Mall”, but a Shopping city, where there are many many malls. This makes it closer to reality. There usually are many malls in a city and many times some malls specialize in some specific products or solutions. We come across this all the time. If we are looking to buy ladies fashion garments and we have a certain style in mind, we know from instinct that the best place to start will be, lets us say Mall A. We know that there are quite a few options there i.e. multiple brands/shops with similar stuff, offering us choice and variety.

Now consider the case of a single shop within Mall A. Let us call this supplier B. Now if you are supplier B ( and there may be many such supplier B’s in the Mall A), and you want to make sure that the visitors to the shopping city should come by your shop, where would you put up your advertisement? At all the gates of the City? Imagine the city has many gates, and that each of the supplier B chooses to advertise at all the gates. Imagine the clutter at the gates, the advertisement is likely to be lost in the crowd. Also, consider the fact that as this Supplier B is a specialist and that not every visitor is interested in buying ladies fashion, the hit rate for the ad will be very poor.

Will it not make sense to just advertise Mall A at the city gates, making sure that people know that if they are looking for ladies fashion, they must come to Mall A. The individual supplier B, now just need to advertise at the gates of Mall A. This makes the City gates much less cluttered, and the advertisement now becomes targetted, as only the people interested in ladies fashion are visiting Mall A.

Can you relate this to some similar stuff happening on the Internet? Stay tuned as I discuss some of these special gates in the weeks that follow.