Walk into an AppleStore these days and you see a crowd of teenagers hanging around the iPod section foraging through iPod accessories. A bit of observation on the street shows the younger crowd is expressing themselves through their iPod belts, holders, modified jeans and jackets, armbands and headphones. During a recent walk through Chelsea in Manhattan I saw any number of exotic iPod holders and a store that offered products that would work with leather and chains to very distinctive holders for runners.
I mentioned this to an anthropologist who works as a trend spotter. She said the iPod has become powerful enough that the accretion disk (she knows I have a physics background -- I have no idea if anthropologists talk about accretion disks) of related products has become large. The trend setters are still using iPods, in fact more so than last year, but the player is not the center of their statement. They are making their statements through accessories and they can be creative or buy someone else's creativity. In many cases some of these things have become objects of lust (Prada cases, $250 custom milled stainless steel holsters, etc ... even the lowly Shuffle has accessories that cost more than it does).
She was asked by a very large manufacturer of consumer electronics to predict when the iPod "fad" would end ... after all, this company is loosing a huge amount of money and all of their new products have died quickly. She told them she would be happy to do the work, but some preliminary work indicated they wouldn't be happy with the likely result. (and I thought I had a bad time marketing the services of our little company). Her "free" estimate was at least twelve months with the possibility of Apple sustaining very high market share for a much longer time if they are clever. The company declined to contract her services.
Apparently the core trend setters are heavily invested in the iPod in all of the dimensions that mater to an anthropologist. You can calculate lag times and propagation of these trends through society.
Unlike the CEOs of Creative, Napster and a host of other companies, she believes the iPod is not a fad. Others can gain share in the segment, but in addition to building a better than ipod device cracking the accretion disk of cool stuff as it becomes more visible to the common user is going to be very hard.
I mentioned my own work that shows CDs are being ripped as cleartext aac among iPod users, so the standards that must be supported by any successful player are mp3 and aac. She was unaware of that effect and, after a bit of reflection, agreed (assuming my data is correct).
She did say she was currently doing work on iPods and mobile phones for a very large company. As they are paying her they have total control of her findings and she was very quiet.
I tend to be more interested in what technically clueful anthropologists have to say about society and technology than engineers and marketers.
It wasn't Apple intention but it's worked out that way - the ipod may be the first mass market that is so customizable that the user doesn't perceive it to be a fad. Companies are always trying to find that fine line between "limited" which boosts status but also ultimately limits profitability to mass market which boosts profits but generally has a short appeal and so everyone is applying this formula to the ipod but the ipod is unique.
First, the appeal of status is an object you can be seen carrying or driving around in but that usually entails a buy-in of hundreds of dollars to thousands and when the fad is over, you're stuck with something that's X% of your income - unless you're a celeb or wealthy, you have to choose carefully.
The ipod is different because the buy in has now been lowered to $99 and that was in short supply - so even though a high % of adult america's can scrap together $99, the shortage justed added to it.
The ipod is different because for a mass market item, yet each one is uniquely different - if you do nothing else, no two people have the exact same playlist so unlike almost everything else, you're immediately different even if you're holding the exact same model (& version).
(Apple is also accidentially smart in that new versions come out every 6 months).
The ipod is also different because of the unique now nearly WAl-Mart sized cottage industry - for as little as $20 more, not only do you have a completely different playlist but a different case ... or much different? There's a company that will paint it, you can wrap a tattoo around or adore it with crystals (or P Diddy-like with diamonds) ... so two people carrying ipods, one with a Korn tattoo wrap and 5,000 neue-metal songs is so NOT the same as the person with a pink ipod with pink crystals and 5,000 different songs ... the same, yet not the same.
The closest would be a car but that takes a big commitment - an ipod is only a $99 to $450 committment that not only shows you can buy the best machine out there but reflects your personality AND gives you a soundtrack to your life - how the hell can you top that?
You can't. At least not now and not yet.
Posted by: jbelkin | May 22, 2005 at 18:37