I had dinner recently with a friend who watches over new media for a traditional media/information company, and the subject of the A La Carte Society came up… Though usually I find myself trying hard to convince folks to take the prospect– the threat and promise– seriously, this evening, I found myself on the other side, arguing that, even as there’s a seemingly-gravitational pull to the more granular, to more and more finely-grained choice, and to buying in the moment to satusfy current needs/desires– buying Just in Time– there’s an (equal? and) opposite pull toward buying against possible needs/desires, toward bundles and packages and subscriptions… toward buying Just in Case.
I’ve seen the “JIC” logic accrue in two kinds of (overlapping, but essentially different, I believe) kinds of places, and maybe a third:
- where the access to material JIT/a la carte is very difficult (or impossible)… e.g., academic journals until a few years ago: subscribe, or do without.
- where the transaction costs (in dollars or effort) of a la carte are high, so JIC is a savings… e.g., cable packages, magazine subscriptions, et al.: it’s entirely possible to get them JIT, but it’s cheaper and/or easier to subscribe. (c.f. also, the [ostensible] case of telecoms bundling)
and possibly
- where the “grab bag” enticement of offers promises sort of reward… sometimes savings, sometimes, convenience, sometimes surprise/delight… e.g., pre-pay packages of all sorts.
(As say, I think that these are overlapping and related, but separate. In the end, they may evolutionary steps…)
After our dinner, my friend wondered if perhaps there could be a “census”– an analysis of where we are on the JIC-JIT spectrum– to establish the position and the likely future of the market for companies like his. While I’ve never attempted such a survey, I suspect that one could be done. And while I reckon that it might indeed help one spot “the bottom,” the other (and possibly equally useful) product would be a series of ideas/leads on how to rethink (an information company’s) approach to selling bundles/subscriptions/JIC… because I’m pretty convinced that packages will survive– just not in the traditional form to which we’ve been accustomed over the last many decades…
The other fascinating angle here to me is the impact of the reshaping of the consumer proposition on advertising: seems to me likely that we’ll have a hybrid model of support in the future as we have in the past– but that advertising could be as “different” (from what we’ve known) as the consumer model will be.
Indeed, that there wil emerge a “third place,” off and above the old continuum between “sponsored”/infomercial at one extreme, and “church and state separation” at the other– the consumer and advertising support models could intersect, even merge, in a really fascinating way…
More on that in a later posting…
Filed in Advertising, Competition and Industry Structure, Economic, Information Industry, Marketing, Media and Entertainment, Social, Technological
