Tipping Point Blog Post 5

This week in Tipping Point, Gladwell explores the Air Walk shoes.  Immediately I drew a connection to the Case Study we read and responded to in class.  The two cases are strikingly similar.  The air walk shoes appealed to hipsters and the mainstream alike by releasing products that were distinctly aimed at each group, they were able to appease two vastly different segments of consumers.  "Early Adopters" in southern California were beach loving skateboarders who were the initial targets of the company, but they didn't just buy them, they translated them.  This group of highly specialized people leveled, sharpened, and assimilated the product to make it popular in the mainstream as well.  Airwalk realized it had just expanded its reach to potential buyers and through segmentation was able to please the masses.  As it reached its highest point of success however, it switched strategies and made its products more wholesale centric.  With nothing specialized, different, or unique, it lost the key component that made it popular in the first place.  It was then no different from a major retailer, and was no longer "cool." This is almost exactly what my proposal for James was in the case study.  I thought it would be best to separate the cupcake company into an artisan entity for small scale, boutique sales, and then a larger segment for huge production of less intricate products.  The problem for Airwalks was that they decided to release one product and hope that it would please both types of people based on name value alone.  It failed miserably, as it probably would for the cupcake company because once you sell your soul to the devil (wholesale), your product becomes nothing but a price tag with a cost to make that they drive as low as possible without regard to the integrity of it.  I think segmentation also is not a good long term solution however, as the vast majority of the time one part is hugely more successful than the other and it ends up a disaster for the company as a whole (see Netflix).