Strategy Insight

Exhibit B in our discussion…www.dailycandy.com

Daily Candy – at least according to their web site – is “a free daily e-mail from the front lines of fashion, food, and fun. Sign up to get the scoop on hot new restaurants, designers, secret nooks, and charming diversions in your city and beyond.”

Visit the site. You’ll find it a bit overwhelming. There are editions according to where you live. There are also sections organized by what you are looking for – beauty, travel, house, food and culture.

Daily Candy is selling its women readers a way of life and hopefully, a better life.  And it’s doing it by communicating with them every day.

From a business perspective, they have taken a vertical, fashion, and delved very deeply into it. Like the RealAge site, Daily Candy is building a deep relationship which will afford them the opportunities to sell a wide range of products and services.

And like RealAge, there is really more going on here. By becoming the source for all things fashion related, these sites, with their readers’ permissions, have a license to communicate – and promote – and sell.

By building loyalty, these sites are creating a captive audience. This audience returns again and again, and more often than not, someone is buying an item or complimentary item to something that the person already owns.

The important takeaway is that while the models that we are very familiar with may not work for the housewares industry, there are many others and others being created daily that will work.

The lesson of dailycandy.com and RealAge (and Yelp, a site that reviews locations, clubs, stores, etc) is that in certain circumstances a traditional web store model will not work. However, other models like the ones that build deep relationships about specific focused areas of interest can.

Bottom lining this…we need to expand our view as what business we are in, who our customer is and what we are truly selling. Doing so will allow us to identify new vistas of opportunities.

This entry was posted on April 24, 2009 at 4:42 am and is filed under Leadership, Sales, Strategic Plans. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: customer loyalty, dailycandy, RealAge, yelp