Why do companies make it hard to collect their products?

My wife is an avid collector of holiday items from specific companies or along various themes. Most of us enjoy completing our collections. When it comes to performing research and finding what those companies have planned, designed and built — she always ends up keeping her own personal records. As an example, when she wants to know if there is a new “Snowflake and Jake” item, such as a Canape Plate or Cookie Jar, she ends up periodically looking on their website. Sometimes she’ll instead do a web search and find out there is an item she doesn’t have because they no longer sell it. It is left to the consumer to find the information and connect the dots.

When I first started looking at this problem I thought the solution was one of event notification.

Does this problem sound familiar? Years ago this problem (or a similar one) was solved with the advent of the subscription and RSS (Really Simple Syndication) models. Instead of frequently going to your favorite websites to see what changes have happened, you could instead drop their RSS feed into your reader and/or subscribe for email notification on changes.

As I worked through it became clear that the problem goes a bit beyond the “communication on changes” activity. Vendors seem to lack any history related to their own products, especially companies that create collectibles. They instead seem to focus on the current and don’t care about the past.

There is a large disconnect with their customers. Collectors care about the past and completing collections. They also care about pictures and descriptions; those specific attributes that paint the full picture of the collectible item.

Do I have a solution?

Well it just so happens that I do, and that solution is free from most technical costs but does require a small investment from the people side. The returns will drive more business to their presence and increase the value that customers see from their products and services.

Now imagine that for each product you create, you also populate some minimal documentation for it. Attributes such as photographs, name, description, links to a family of like products, would be helpful to collectors. This “metadata” can be connected to the product within the catalog used by customers to purchase inventoried items. This could also reduce the need for duplicate entry of data if the catalog actually read the stored attributes from the wiki and displayed them within the catalog to be viewed by the customer during purchase.

When the product is no longer available (end of run, inventory at zero, retired), then catalog entry is simply removed. The key is not to remove the wiki entry while removing the catalog mapping. This allows for some persistence of product information without inventory in the catalog. And that is what makes collectors happy.

I do realize that there may be some issues with this level of public documentation and content availability. You now begin to expose information which could be consumed by others assembling their own catalog to compete against you. There are simple security measures to minimize this type of activity.

Instead of keeping everything close to your chest — choose to share. Making the information available will only grow your customer trust and commitment to collect your products.

If you are interested in continuing this discussion or digging into other ideas, drop me a note.

  This article has been Digiproved © 2011