The Valley of Mediocre between Land of Free and Premium Highland

Flipping the Bell curve

Since long businesses take the Bell curve or normal distribution for granted for mass production.

In the mass production era, the rule is to find and target the right product to the average consumer or customer and sell it in large quantities at a competitive price.

Douglas Warshaw has observed On-Demand content and came to the conclusion the content consumers are not following the Bell curve in their behavior.

He named this new curve the “Warshaw curve“.

Applying the Warshaw curve to B2C

The view of the Warshaw curve is supported by Adam Park (Lovely Auer) and has applied it to consumer goods.

As a first example he uses cell phones:
At the low end:
People can get a mobile phone free or at a significant price discount with a subscription with a mobile provider.
At the high end
There are more sophisticated mobile phones with many functionalities and features.

Long Tail in relation to Warshaw era

Adam Park (Lovely Auer) writes in his document:

In the age of affluence or Long Tail (Chris Andersen) market place, one can get exactly what one wants. Loyalty is only gained when you deliver the value your customer expects to get.

In the Warshaw curve era, the consumer distribution looks more like:
- two hills
- a valley in between.

This means that there’ll be:
- Land of Free
- Valley of Mediocre
- Highland of Premium.

The Land of Free:
- Gillette started this trend by giving away the safety razor holder and making consumers pay for the blades.
- Ink jet printers: being paid by the cartridge consumption afterwards
- Low cost clothes by H&M (a t-shirt at $10 is almost free)
- OpenID free single digital identity
- Google Apps, Google Earth, Google Maps, …web based email

Valley of Mediocre:
- Counterfeit designer clothes
- Too early but could well be: Information Card Foundation: Higgins (Open source) and Microsoft’s CardSpace
- Free hosting: but cluttered with advertising and not getting indexed by search engines

In the Premium Highland:
- The demands of customers needs to be catered.
- All that matters is comprehensive user experience.
- Expensive designer clothes.
- Verisign VIP authentication service Consumer pays for the token, merchant pays for each authentication
- Paid Internet services and hosting

Could the Warshaw curve be an addition or enhancement of the Long Tail?
Or is the Warshaw curve a better concept and thus an improvement over the Long Tail?

One-for-all” to “all-for-one”

From the “one-for-all” product, the world is changing over to “all-for-one” product.
You want your car to be equipped with exactly those requirements you have.
Compare this with Ford-T “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black”.
People demand more an more their (almost) personal products as they want to be recognized in this universal world.
They have the choice between free (or almost free products) and the premium products.

iPhone in Valley of Mediocre?

Just wondering why the iPhone seemed to have switched over from the Highland of Premium to the Valley of the Mediocre with the new the 3G + GPS version by selling at $199 (sponsored by the mobile service provider)?
Due to this sponsored pricing the iPhone doesn’t belong to the Land of Free or low cost and neither belongs to the Highland of Premium. Although the high subscription rate makes it a premium again but that doesn’t show up immediately.

The question is: will it be still be classy or chic to own an iPhone?
Le Freak C’est Chic.

Recognition for the Warshaw era?

The Long Tail has received widespread approval and acceptance.
Will the Warshaw era find the same recognition?

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