What Would Google Do_ - Jeff Jarvis [94]
What if a car company became the leader in getting people around and used others’ hardware: planes, trains, and automobiles? You tell the system where you need to go—or with access to your Google Calendar, it just knows—and it gives you choices at various price points: Today, you can take the train for less. Tomorrow, you drive because you’re running errands. The day after, you carpool to save money. This weekend, you get a nice Mercedes for the anniversary dinner. Next week, you take a chauffeur-driven car to impress clients. Along the way, you can pay for options: your entertainment synced in the car, wireless connectivity on the train, alerts to your iPhone, navigation concierges who direct you around jams. This is the new personal transportation and connections company built on the old car company as a platform. Hop aboard the Googlemobile.
Google Cola: We’re more than consumers
If big cars are hard to Googlify, packaged consumer products are harder. They are the building blocks of the mass market, predicated on manufacturing efficiency and marketing to a critical mass. Since the beginning of the internet as an advertising medium, it has been a truism that no one will click on a banner ad for—let alone join a club or write a blog post about—toilet paper. TP is everyone’s example of a product that could not possibly benefit from the web. There’s nothing Googley about toilet paper. Right? Besides perhaps getting TP printed with Wikipedia’s knowledge (there are TP publishers) or made from renewable, recycled resources, I must concede: I can’t conceive of Google Ultra Soft Toilet Tissue.
Are all consumer products doomed to life without Googlification? Let’s imagine Google Cola. The strength and weakness of cola, like other consumer products, is that it is intended to be one-size-fits-all. Yes, a number of cola brands and variations fight for scarce supermarket shelf space. But there are never enough varieties. I can’t find my perfect cola. Mine would be caffeine-free but made with sugar instead of artificial sweeteners (can’t stand the aftertaste) and it would come in a small can so it wouldn’t go flat, or better yet, a bottle that could be reused. It might have a flavor added (cherry today, coffee tomorrow). I’ll take Coke or Pepsi (I’m bicola), but I don’t like off-brands (I still shudder remembering Howard Johnson’s HoJo Cola). What if Coke retooled a bottler to make special-order batches to be delivered—but only if I committed to buying so many cases a year? I would pay a premium to subscribe to my perfect cola.
If I sold this Jeff Cola to others on my blog or in the neighborhood (convincing them that decaf coffee-flavored soda is not an oxymoron) perhaps my price could drop because I’d be bringing in more sales and volume. I’d create a cola club. It’s no different from Gary Vaynerchuk’s Vayniaks making and promoting their own wine. We’d become product managers and salespeople as well as consumers and customers. We could invent our own flavors of Coke, sold under our brand, using Coke as a platform for manufacturing and distribution. We’d be in the cola business. Will my cola go mass? Not a chance. But a bunch of smalls could add up to a big, and Coke ends up in a new and loyal relationship with a lot of customers. It learns more about the public’s taste and may develop new products to sell on a larger scale. It saves on marketing as collaborators sell products. It gets a piece of businesses that might otherwise take bits of market share. It finds a way to battle the tide of commodification in consumer products and joins in the small-is-the-new-big economy.
The cola strategy could be applied to most any consumable product that would benefit from specialization and personalization: cookies, candy, ecological home-cleaning products with personalized scents. It could be executed not just by big companies but also and more likely by small ones using sales platforms such as Amazon and eBay. About the only mass product I know that customizes