Benin Brown

10:41 PM | Posted by Benin | Edit Post Woot...Woot!

So this week in my Advanced Internet Marketing strategies course our instructor, Mr. Daniel Yonts, introduced us through a discussion to an organization called Woot!

Little or no natural competition

I'd actually heard of them before but to be honest didn't really pay them much mind until we discussed them in class.  As it turns out one of the things that makes this brand so different is that the company doesn't have any natural competitors.  As Daniel had explained to us this company has whittled down its core competencies to such a narrow focus that even though they are in their most literal sense are an e-commerce firm; in reality they're really more of a closely knit community of like minded individuals that happens to sell items online.

Highly defined niche

Another unique aspect of Woot's business model is that they only sell one product line a day.  For instance, today if you go to their homepage you would see that today Woot is selling an mp3 player that's called a V-Touch-it looks a lot like an iPod for $79.  My guess is that from 12a this morning until now they've probably sold thousands of V-Touch's today.  Judging much of the literature on their site, both company and user generated, it isn't uncommon for Woot to sell out of an item after just the first few hours of beginning the sale.  And keep in mind that they do a new sale every day starting at 12am...

Another observation worth mentioning is that Woot has managed to not only carve out a very distinct niche but they seem to be masters at speaking their audience or participants' language.  In other words, Woot doesn't assume that their audience wants to be spoken to like Woot's employees or management like being spoken to...No, they actually have such an intimate understanding of their audience that Woot's communication is in total sync with their audience's!  They have figured out what Bryan Eisenberg calls the Golden Rule of Interactive Marketing, "Market unto others as you would have them market unto you".

All about the community

As a result of this interwoven relationship between Woot and its participants you will notice that their content has a rather irreverent and "take it or leave it" sort of tone to it.  Then when you read the comments of the users their content is almost indistinguishable from Woot's posts (they use forum's on their site to discuss general life stuff, as well as products of the day).  I like what Daniel said about them, "It's almost as if Woot is more about the community than it is about the items that they sell."  This community driven approach makes it very easy for both customers and Woot's staff to be brutally honest in their assessment of each items strengths and weaknesses.  This level of communication certainly seems to be either rare or just all together missing in the retail industry overall...

Persona driven marketing

There is another Internet marketing tenet that relates to how well Woot understands their audience called utilizing personas.  My feeling from studying their site is that Woot probably appeals heavily to spontaneous and humanistic personas.

Finally, let me note something else that flies in the face of traditional marketing wisdom-Woot does not appeal to just one demographic like one might expect from a niche brand.  The two personas that I mentioned above come from every social or economic background that you could think of but the common denominator with this audience lies between the personas and the self image that this audience seeks to imbue amongst themselves.  At barley 4 years old and sales of over 117 mil USD I'd say that Matt Rutledge and the rest of the Woot team are on to something...