In the week 2 reading, the article on 'The Dawn of Human Networks" is emblematic of the brand community concept that Prof. Frisbie discussed in his podcast for this week's concept.
I like THreadless's campaign of design contests. This brings in new ideas completely free of cost which in turn results in millions of dollars revenue, yet paying the winners a handsome prize. But this total prize amount is simply a fractional amount of revenue. Bottom line is that Threadless costs are rock bottom. Why so? Free idea generation net of prize payment, free promos from the vast online submission and awareness of the T-shirt interested community and just a meager cost of $5 per T-shirt, resulting in huge profit margins.
Besides, the cusomers and the design contest participants all seem to get a sense of empowerment that goes to add a pat on their back for their creativity which in essence is a passion more than making money. This gives us all a sense of satisfaction that we otherwise hardly obtain from our daily working profession which is to a large extent is capital driven.
The silver lining is that their businesses are embraced with a fresh look as evident by their lecture invitations to the Sloan school of Management at MIT.
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