coverage on Steve Ballmer's keynote address at the forum (Gmail spell check does not recognize the name :-)), TV glasses that allow you to see big-screen video from your mobile device inside a pair of goggles and a video technology that senses your movements and transfers them
to the digital domain (the combination is likely to sell for less than USD 100, so it's cheap). I have shared the link below (better than the link to an index page that Guardiantech provided) and a train of thought on one of the innovations on display:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/ces
The "abnormal" favorite was the video on virtual reality and how VR entrepreneurs are making money out of the medium - real money being made out of virtual commerce in virtual games. It is possible that I missed something here but while the idea might seem fantastically
weird to many, I found it interesting from a different perspective. All this while market researchers, analysts and marketing professionals had been thinking in terms of serving up markets by segments that were not only different in terms of their attitudinal
and lifestyle characteristics but also, in terms of a demographic separation that allowed one to serve markets by clearly assuming that certain demographic segments have common attitudes, tastes, lifestyles and product preferences. Come post-modernism and the lifestyle bit was
reinforced and we were looking at consumer communities that shared common lifestyles but could be global in nature. However, demographics remained a mainstay for easily typing consumers at least in so far as age was concerned (not surprisingly, the "baby boomer" roots of much of this stuff is not easy to overcome) and stage of the household (in the US). In technology products in a developing world context, education remains important and will continue to be so and this is an obvious exception to what I ramble about below.
My take on this is (and I do need some feedback here) is whether within the same demographic, people make distinct lifestyle choices depending on different personality types which brings us back either to a second layer of segmentation once target segments by demographic
type was determined or to one of two choices a) decide on your target demographic - do a preliminary MR scan on the demographic to determine receptivity to your concept/product/service and then drill further to personality types within the demographic for your positioning b) forget demographics all-together and segment on personality types.
Obviously, the choice between the three depends on whether you are looking at a broad-based product/concept or a niche concept. The latter is what VR is about. The difference again, depends on whether your concept is disruptive in the same way as VR is, which determines
which part of the adoption curve you need to capitalize on. Thus while the concept may have appeared, at the first, as a no-go, there obviously is a type, a segment to whom this appeals immensely. Virtual commerce, of course, has a different dimension - while many real world commodities cannot have virtual counterparts with the same utility value, recent advances in sensory technologies and real-virtual interfaces (fluid interfaces) does provide immense
opportunities for providers of entertainment and social media content - virtual discotheques, adult dating services and the sex industry. These are industries where the offering is broad based in terms of not being for a particular demographic (except discotheques, the rest are
for 18-60 and beyond) but where the technology itself is new and would appeal only to a particular segment (we note here that an early adopter of the Que need not necessarily be an early adopter of VR entertainment and thus, typing from the adoption curve of general
technology products is not of much value here.Typing from the adoption curve for Internet dating and porn is a more reliable guidepost.) Thus personality typing takes precedence and demographic typing is only of secondary curiosity value.
Even while I was playing with this idea - (the idea track was Brand personality --> Human Personality Types --> Big 5 --> Nanogram -->personality traits based segmentation), I chanced upon a consumer trends report which suggests that this is gaining ground. I will post
that in sometime (a retweet again).
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