AWESOME_AIRDRIE #3 post-analysis

I had a great opportunity to give a spiel and win a $1000 prize to help fund a project, at the AWESOME_AIRDRIE #3 competition (see http://www.creativeairdrie.ca/ )

I nailed my spiel. It felt great to have the undivided attention of so many influential people for 90 seconds. That's a value that I otherwise couldn't afford, yet as an average citizen I experienced no barriers to entry. I'm very greatful for that opportunity, and commend the organizers, participants, judges and volunteers.

I didn't win. After hearing the others I did predict the winner. Trying to summarize what I think will win -for future reference- the 2006 book "The Long Tail" by the Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson popped to mind, for it's lucid talk about sales rank graphs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Tail   refers to book featuring a sales rank graph and commercial viability

- ‘the long tail’ refers to the right side of the graph, formerly sub-commercial items have become commercially viable recently by cutting production costs via online retailing

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html  see the thumbnail diagrams on this page

The LongTail/Sales Rank Graph can be broken into 3 sections:

#1. over-commercial or supra-commercial or public-good: not only are these commercially viable, there’s enough local demand so the public can ‘buy in bulk’ / negotiate special rates by buying collectively as a public good if it can be delivered as a public good

#2. commercial: enough local demand so that at some price and quantity there is a viable non-zero market equilibrium

#3. sub-commercial / LongTail: not enough local demand to make it commercial viable so it’s done as hobbies by those that love it and will subsidize it with their own time, effort and pocket money. Or not done locally at all / done in a nearby large population centre.

Hypothesis: the A_A contest is converging toward favoring #1 over/supra-commercial entries. Some of the entries -like mine- seemed to be in #3 subcommercial/longtail: we were there giving our pitch because our ideas are subcommercial and we are hunting for a solution to that problem.

There are a few solutions for #3s like mine to help them move down the sales rank curve (sell more) and at least make it into commercial territory:

1. adjustments to offerings to make them appeal to more local buyers (less specialized, broader appeal) to raise demand into the commercial zone

2. expanding beyond local market to sell to nearby larger population centre (presumably keeping the same % of population interested, selling to a larger population should bring up units demanded)

3. Recommendation Engines – which say “if you like this mainstream item, you may love this LongTail item”. I haven't looked into if or how that would work in Airdrie.

And something to help them become commercial without changing their sales rank:

4. cut production costs ie by switching from physical delivery to online / video / automated

If I have a linguering issue it's how to help these subcommercial ideas insofar as they can be helped. Perhaps there could be an Airdrie LongTail collector website, for those with non-mainstream tastes looking to accumulate like-minded citizens into a small market, and those with non mainstream supply looking to find rare buyers.

more...

Analysis of Airdrie as a market:

Q. Assuming all of the above 4 remediations, and assuming AWESOME contests can and are also done in larger population centers to the same extent, does it mean that Airdrie should attract home buyers / new citizens who are somewhat more mainstream or less mainstream in their demand patterns?

I suspect it depends on the ‘viable scale’ of things. Lets talk about athletics - winner of the A_A this time, and a category that's seen in the 3 segments of the sales rank curve. Calgary has several athletic centres, each one serving a small section of Calgary perhaps the size of Airdrie. But for rarer things Calgary might have viable commercial services and Airdrie not. Lets say if you compare a chunk of Calgary that’s the size of Airdrie – both 40,000 – then comparatively Airdrie would tend to attract more mainstream citizens than the Calgary equivalent, because the Calgarians can drive a few minutes out of their zone to get to rarer services, and Airdrie residents can’t. Therefore Airdrie would tend to attract more mainstream shoppers compared to equivalent zones in Calgary. The mainstream demand patterns might accumulate / compound over several cycles of growth. Net result: “Airdrie destiny: city of mainstreamers”

If so this might be helpful to inform those concidering new initiatives. If there’s something that will somehow give large city rare services at prices afordable to small city residents, that might take up quicker in Airdrie than Calgary. Otherwise if it’s a regular business model then care must be taken to ensure the city is large enough to support it – that it makes it out of subcommercial longtail and into commercially viable demand quantities.

So from this I would guess that if there was no #1 over-commercial entry in AWESOME_AIRDRIE, the next best entry would be one that solves a problem about something sub-commercial in a way and to an extent that it converts a subcommercial item into a mainstream item, and then proposes an over-commercial business model to allow Airdronians to buy it collectively as a public good to save money. That’s a giant jump, and if it could be made, it would likely also apply to larger population centers, and would likely already be done in larger population centers. Which puts us back to the more likely scenario of A_A supporting over-commercial deals, and Airdrie trending to a population of mainstreamers.

It could be argued that the winning entry -a climbing pole project- did invent some way to make something sub-commercial into something over-commercial. I’ve seen climbing walls at local athletic centers in Calgary. I wouldn’t be surprised to see them at GenesisPlace sometime in the future. I suspect the climbing pole fills a transitory gap in what would normally be an over-commercial service.

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