Sohodojo’s Omidyar.net Blog

Suspend Disbelief to Envision Shopping as It Can Be

John Berger said:

Jim and Timlynn, your post is fascinating. I love and agree with your deathtrap 1 �?? you have said it way more concisely than I ever could have. I can�??t understand deathtrap 2, but my failure is because I don�??t understand what the alternative could be…

Personally, I don�??t think I have ever purchased something online because I was �??engaged�?�…

I am falling into the trap here of assuming my shopping patterns are typical, but I think you would agree that most retailers, even the successful online ones, think the same way…

Hey John and Mark,

Aha! John, your last post shows that you are trying but struggling as you enter the ‘zone’ where you can suspend disbelief and think about ’shopping’ that is not shopping. Congratulations! This struggle is a necessary first step toward envisioning breakthrough innovations necessary for NED’s success. (”Grasshopper,” as David Carradine’s elder would tell him in an old King Fu episode,”Your strength is your weakness, your weakness is your strength.”)

What you described in your ‘use case’ about how/why you shop is a great example of shopping as we know it. Essentially all on-line and real world shopping environments and business models known to date were envisioned and designed with the assumption that the most central element of shopping is finding and acquiring some thing, some stuff, some product that you want and need.

Forget that. For most of us in non-marginalized, non-impoverished circumstances, we probably have nearly all the stuff we need. Sure, there are consumables that we have to shop for repeatedly (food, toilet paper, etc.). And sometimes we have excess capital and want to treat ourselves to a new something or other that will enhance our personal life. For these things, we shop — as in the shopping as we know it way. Price, quality, and service all still, and will, matter.

And yet, while we keep acquiring the stuff that the marketeers tell us we need to be happy, cool, accepted, envied, whatever, there is still a sucking black hole in our lives that says, “Is that all there is? Is this the sum and substance of my life?”

It is shopping as it can be that will speak to and address this void/need/drive in our lives. Imagine a shopping (consumer) experience where the product is incidental to the experience, where the experience/participation itself has intrinsic, fulfilling value. Where the product is the prize in the Cracker Jack box.

Sure, as Mark says in terms of the ’shopper bandwidth’ analogy, NED has to appeal to and serve the ‘thing/product need’ of those who engage in shopping as we know it. But it will be our envisioning and working to explore and create shopping as it can be that will trigger the network effect that puts NED’s impact into the marketing history books.

It is interesting, but understandable. Over the years that we have been exploring these ideas, it is those with the most knowledge and experience in marketing (the strategists of shopping as we know it) who have the hardest time suspending disbelief and imagining shopping as it can be. Yet, once these folks break that tyranny of certainty about know how things are and always will be, we believe these folks will be among our most valuable envisioneers leading the charge to create shoping as it can be.

“Grasshopper, your strength is your weakness. Your weakness is your strength.”

–Sohodojo Timlynn and Jim–

Add comment December 1st, 2005

The Limits of Bricks and Mortar for Small Is Good Markets

John, Luke, and Mark,

We’ll reply in two parts. In this post we address our concern about too tight a focus on bricks and mortar storefronts. In a second post we’ll address the apprehensions folks have about the challenges of doing NED On-line.

We are not saying that there is no place for bricks and mortar in the NED vision. Rather, physical storefronts need to be a supplemental embodiment of the NED vision rather than its necessary foundation.

We think there is essentially agreement that NED needs to be realized in both bricks and mortar storefronts and as an on-line marketplace/community. We do, however, want to take a moment to make it clear why we want to be sure that the NED vision is not too dependent on a physical storefront strategy.

Although we risk being wrong by presumption as we don’t have explicit knowledge of each of your personal circumstances, it sounds like a number of folks contributing to this thread live in metropolitan areas where physical shopping is readily accessible and full of choices. This is simply not the daily reality for a vast number of folks in the world outside these metro areas.

We spent the last two years in remote northcentral Montana, and last year we relocated to Fairfield, a small (but unusually creative and active) town of less than 10,000 people in rural southeast Iowa. We have a Walmart on the edge of town, and a couple of chain supermarkets. But other than that it’s local merchants that meet our needs. It’s a one or two hour trip to an urban area to get anything close to a major mall, or to find a selection of the retail chain stores that many folks in metro areas take for granted.

This is not a case of better or worse lifestyles. It is just an indication of the range of differences (and therefore the range of opportunities) in which the NED vision is being formed.

Even if wildly successful and the NED network/chain were to grow to many hundreds of storefronts, there is little chance that there will be one in our town or in any of the thousands of rural small towns and distressed urban communities that might want one.

So please do not be overly focused on urban/exurban bricks and mortar as a context for the NED vision. The danger is that this focus could skew the perceived demographic of the NED customer base. And this skew could warp the NED vision into becoming the very thing to which it is trying to be a counterpoint.

–Sohodojo Jim and Timlynn–

Add comment November 30th, 2005

The Small Is Good World Marketplace and The Dream Society

Paul O’Hara said:

Jim and Timlynn said: * “The world desperately needs alternative markets that address the myriad of other behavioural motivators that contribute to health and happiness”

Thanks Jim and Timlynn for bringing the price debate so far forward. Couldn’t agree more.

You are welcome, Paul. And thank you for contributing such a thoughtful and “spot on” reply.

�??The heart has its reasons that reason does not know�?� Pascal

He’s so right. Pop forward a few centuries and you’ll find this same sentiment reflected in Danish futurist Rolf Jensen’s insightful book, The Dream Society, where he describes how we are becoming more Hunter-Gatherers of the Heart than Cultivators of the Mind. Jensen goes on to make a strong case for the emerging importance of story and emotion in marketing and organization ‘visioning’. We explore Jensen’s ideas further in Nanocorps in the Dream Society: How ‘Small is Good’ Business Webs Will Compete in the Story-driven Marketplaces of the 21st Century

“Happiness is when what one thinks, what one says, and what one does are in harmony” Ghandi

Again spot on, Paul. Notice what Gandhi doesn’t say… It isn’t about what you have, your stuff, that is important to a fulfilled, happy life. Madison Avenue would obviously consider Gandhi a dangerous person to be silenced if he was still around shaking things up.

If the three key purchasing drivers are price, quality and service and lowest price is not an option for an ethical retailer or the Small is Good market, then we must add equivalent or greater value back into the offer elsewhere.

Those three dimensions are adequate when you limit yourself to consumer purchase dynamics in the Big Is Good World. But we believe that Pascal, Ghandi, Jensen, and others are suggesting that there is much more to life that stuff consumption. Sure, price is important to a lot of folks. And, yes, they will pay more for appreciable quality. And service is worth paying for. But this still leaves a whole spectrum of Maslow-ian human needs to bring to the shopping experience. Paul, you go on to say…

Please consider Maslows Hierarchy of Needs … the human motivations which in turn drive our needs and eventually influence our behaviours. As we evolve up the hierarchy, I would hope that we will move away from todays ignorant and selfish pre-occupation with lowest price.

We’re on the same wavelength. Once we break the tight-coupling of price and product we can begin to transform the act of shopping into a diverse, interactive, impactful community- and world-changing experience that fulfills many human needs beyond our basic need for more stuff. When we start to realize this transformation, we will be on the road to Nedville which will be found somewhere in the emerging Small Is Good World.

–Sohodojo Jim and Timlynn–

Add comment November 29th, 2005

Can’t Buy Me Love… Happiness, Belonging

nmw said:

Sohodojo Jim and Timlynn said:

price does not have to be the ultimate driver of markets.

I am also trained as an economist (I have several documents with letters on them) and I am also inspired by the work of Schumacher — but the statement above is very difficult to swallow (especially for an economist).

Give me a buck and I’ll tell you some more.

;D nmw

Indeed nmw. It is that very training that ties you to a mindset that is only as real as we accept it to be. Our collective Industrial Era experience is but a blink of the human experience eye. The laws of economics are not so fixed, relatively (or locally relativity-wise) speaking, as those of physics or the other so-called ‘hard’ sciences.

As a human/social science, economics invites experimentation as much as it provides a growing fount of information to guide our thinking. But we cannot let that fount flood our thinking and blind us to alternatives.

We simply would never have breakthrough scientific innovation if one or more inquirers did not ask, “Does it have to be this way?”

The Big Is Good World works best when its consumers are blindly herded by a Siren song telling them that price is king. It simply does not have to be so. And your brother’s sandal story above is a case in point.

Imagine if as many smart, highly motivated economic, behavioral, social, and marketing management scientists suspended disbelief and put as much energy into exploring the multitude of other dimensions of consumer purchase decision dynamics as have been put into honing our skills at single-minded focus on price. We simply have turned a blind eye to the possibilities beyond the obvious.

If money buys stuff, and if happiness is achieved by having enough of all the right stuff — isn’t that the drumbeat of modern marketing? — then why are so many people in affluent societies so unhappy?

The answer is simple. The widely shared misbelief that the acquisition of stuff at the expense of the active and ongoing participation in community is broken. The Big Is Good World’s path to happiness leads to perpetually unsatisfied consumers. This is no accident, it is by design. The Big Is Good World would put itself out of business if stuff-consumption led to satiated customers.

We’re not saying to abandon the Big Is Good World of stuff, only to moderate it with an exciting and engaging alternative. The world desperately needs alternative markets that address the myriad of other behavioral motivators that contribute to health and happiness. And paradoxically, these other market dynamics are not likely to be based on appeals to altruistic benevolence.

When we have a well-tuned economic engine that runs on the twin cylinders of the Big Is Good World and Small Is Good World, charity as we know it will fall into a marginalized role of a tactic of last resort.

–Sohodojo Jim and Timlynn–

Add comment November 22nd, 2005

Breaking the Tyranny of Price - A NED Design Proposition

Small Is Good World marketplaces must break the bonds of tight-coupling between price and product.

We referenced The Nanocorp Primer article, The Yin Yang of eCommerce Engines, in a prior post. One of the tables in this article encapsulates much of the content on this article:

An agora marketplace is a socioeconomic network that brings buyers and sellers together.

We are on this web site creatively collaborating on strategies to change the world largely due to the deep insight that the Omidyars had that resulted in their creation of eBay, the premiere example of an Internet-enabled agora marketplace.

Many believe that the very nature of an agora marketplace disintermediates the supply chain to drive relentlessly toward an optimum (low) price.

If this is the case, then NED and any other Small Is Good World marketplace is doomed.

Fortunately — and this is the message in the above table and, more fully, the article from which it is extracted — price does not have to be the ultimate driver of markets.

A Call to Arms… Legs… Minds

NED, as an example of the emerging Small Is Good World, is a call to arms to “Say it ain’t so!”

NED, which we might liken to the ‘Next eBay’, will be a multi-billion dollar enterprise. But this Next Big Thing, paradoxically, will be found in the Small Is Good World. And its form is much more likely to be an entrepreneurial community ecosystem rather than a corporation. This is why Mark naturally gravitated toward a franchise model for NED. But even the fanchise model is likely to be only a piece of this diverse network ecosystem.

To make the Small Is Good World real we will have to suspend disbelief so we can articulate and pursue business and marketplace design goals that seem hard to imagine in today’s world. NED is an ideal vision around which to collectively imagine this exciting new world and its alternative marketplaces… to imagine, and then to make it real.

–Sohodojo Jim and Timlynn–

Add comment November 21st, 2005

From Static Supply to Dynamic Impact Chains

Mark Grimes said:

I’m thinking the ned online catalogue will look a little something like this at the product level page.

I hope that the shopping cart software will allow for real-time inventory control, but we’ll see how that shapes up.

Product:	Sparkle Multicolored Necklace

Transparency Report

1:	Financial Breakdown:

Artisan: $1.08

LiA exporter: $0.92

Tixeon importer: $0.75

Better World Advertising: $1.12

Retailer: $2.88

Nonprofit distribution: $0.75

2:	SROI (social return on investment measurement): (ideas?)

Would like to also take something like 5-10% for an ever growing microfinance investment fund too, but that may have to be in future version of this.

Other ideas, thoughts, feedback…

Mark,

Your thinking is ’spot on’ as the Brits say, but we don’t think it goes far enough outside the box of what passes for the eCommerce shopping experience. Just like computer user interfaces are built on the obvious transfer metaphors of ‘desktops’, ‘folders’, ‘trash cans’, etc. So, too, are our notions of eCommerce constrained by transference metaphors of ‘catalogs’, ‘inventory’, and most notoriously, the ’shopping cart’.

There is no good reason — other than that folks will intuitively ‘get it’ — for constraining the on-line shopping experience to that of its real world physical counterpart. Not that these metaphors don’t work. Indeed, they are certainly useful when we are talking about commodity shopping where ease of access and lowest price are primary drivers. This is what we would call shopping in the Big Is Good World of nameless, faceless corporations and their product offerings.

But the Small Is Good World of commerce among empowered, collaborative individuals is completely different. Its alternative marketplaces are based on ‘Who, How, and Why” rather than ‘Who Much and Where’ (price and distribution channel control). That is why the Small Is Good World alternative markets will be story-driven and game-oriented.

Yes, there are elements of story in your prototype example above. But you are taking the concept of story to literally. It is not just the narrative tale of the artisan. And, yes, there is both a story and a gaming element in the Transparency Report. But again, this is all within the context of a static ‘catalog’ and a ’shopping cart’. These metaphors constrain the design of your shopping experience.

By way of analogy, think in terms of today’s on-line massively multi-player games such as ‘Guild Wars’, the ‘Sims On-line’, etc. Certainly there is some bit of traditional narrative employed in these games. But its use is most often ‘back story’ and optional. There is a very personal ’story’ being experienced by these game players. But this story is not at all explicit, nor limited to a narrative presentation. The ‘player’ is a character within the play world, and they actively participate in the story-forming of their very personal experience.

In this same sense, the story-driven and game-oriented alternative markets of the the Small Is Good World marketplaces need to be much more dynamically composable by the shopper/player rather than presented as a shopping cart catalog entry. In other words, that Transparency Report needs to be a breadcrumb trail of commerce impact points that the shopper/player actively story-forms through an interactive experience.

To go deeper with this idea, we encourage you to visit the Entrepreneurial Community Ecosystems page where you will find a link to an article, The Yin Yang of eCommerce Engines. Also, if you are interested, we have been working with a flexible, extensible Open Source Content Management System with a radically cool eCommerce framework acc-on that is an ideal candidate for building this kind of story-driven, game-oriented eCommerce platform.

–Sohodojo Jim and Timlynn–

Add comment November 17th, 2005