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Should we be marketing the same product to different socio-economic groups or is there a better way to make money?
Yesterday I mentioned that marketing was a fascinating occupation because there are so many variables that can influence a person to buy or not to buy. Yesterday I came across another variable that I hadn't thought a great deal about before but after reading some search statistics it really is something we should think about and it all has to do with dolls.

Now some years ago there were some exquisite adult dolls being produced ... and there was even a website with a members' area that featured these dolls but they're not the dolls that got me and a few others thinking.

The dolls that got us thinking were those well know dolls Barbie and Bratz. On Sunday the San Francisco Chronicle published an article about the increased interest in the line of Bratz dolls and the apparent decline in interest in Barbie dolls.

That led someone from Hitwise to have a look at the metrics involved in visits to sites that sell Barbie dolls and those that sell Bratz dolls. The figures he found were really rather fascinating because they showed something that a lot of people hadn't realized before.

A child's interest in dolls can be influenced by which socio-economic class they belong to. It seems that more affluent people and kids tend to choose Barbie dolls while those from less affluent backgrounds tend to choose the Bratz dolls. According to Hitwise those socio-economic variations are quite noticeable in major towns and cities, become less noticeable as the size of the town decreases and almost disappears in rural areas.

So it seems that a person's background can really influence what they buy - especially when both products may have a similar price point and that certainly got me thinking about the products we sell.

Could it be that the look and overall feel of a sponsor site might have more appeal to people in one socio-economic group than another?

The first thing you notice when you stop to think about it is that nearly every sponsor has a similar price point for a 30-day membership so could site design and maybe even the language have more appeal to one group than another?

Could it be that a mature site with less coarse language and more decoration might appeal to somebody from the affluent areas of somewhere like Washington while your average reality site might appeal more to an auto worker from Detroit?

I really don't know the answer to that and perhaps only the sponsors would have access to the statistics that might offer some answer to that question. Even so, it is definitely worth thinking about and filing away for future reference. It might even be possible to do a little experimenting if you were a sponsor.

These days with all the fancy scripts that are available it wouldn't be very difficult for a sponsor to run two sites similar to what I've just described that use exactly the same content. While it would be difficult to filter the traffic at the gallery or free site level it might be possible to drop a filter page in somewhere between the affiliate and the sponsor site.

One could clearly offer the base level site while the other offered something that looked different simply because of the language used and the style of the design. Or perhaps the better quality site could be offered as an option to the exit traffic from the basic site.

Of course, that all sounds like it might require a bit of thought and maybe a little bit of hard work so I guess most sponsors would rather just take the sign-ups they can get from their plain site and let the exit traffic go somewhere else. But personally I don't think I could let that traffic go quite so easily.

If it was cost effective or even cost neutral to have two sites I think I would want to try the idea just to see if I could make it work. It obviously works for something as common as dolls so why wouldn't it work for adult sites?

Steve and I are thinking about launching a mainstream e-commerce site in the new year and I could see the plain site and the more attractive site concept working in our situation. It might even be worthwhile to experiment with prices and sell the same product at different price points on the two sites.

See, I told you that marketing was a fascinating occupation and the more I learn about it the more fascinating and challenging it all becomes.

If only more adult sponsors could see the fascination and challenges and realize that becoming fascinated and challenged by it all could improve their bottom lines then we all might be more encouraged to take marketing more seriously.