$3000 handbags, marketing and shared ownership...

Hey guys,

I'm sure I'm going to catch some crap for this, but whatever :) I took my girlfriend to the Sex and the City premier in Seattle on Thursday night. I never really watched the show, but I have to admit, it was a good movie :) it got me thinking about a few things actually...

As you might know, I've held a number of roles in the software industry; I'll probably always think of myself as a developer at heart. But, I also did enjoy my stint in technical marketing.

One of the trick questions in a Microsoft product manager interview is to ask the candidate to define 'marketing'. Invariably, the answer revolves around advertising. The definition that we're hoping to hear is really about defining/growing/identifying markets of customers. A friend and mentor of mine told me that in order to be good at marketing, you really have to have a deeply ingrained interest in how companies make money.

Anyways, so all of this leads back to that Sex and the City movie :) as I'm sure you know, placing products in movies has been common since the 1980's. This is a great article on the subject (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/movies/features/aolinmail.htm).

When it is done too much, it can be really annoying. But when it is done right, it really isn't that bad. For example, it's hard to complain of the product placement in Rambo IV - if you watch the scene towards the end where they synchronize their watches, you'll see a Panerai and I believe a Breitling featured prominently.

Sex and the City is rampant with product placement of course - one local Seattle company managed to get in there as well. The company is called Bag, borrow or steal and what they do is quite interesting. For a fee, you can rent high-end purses, jewelry and other accessories. Before you scoff :) it maybe something to consider if you have a wife/girlfriend. For the next special occasion, you can purchase a gift card that they can spend with that company. Considering that these bags are in the $1000 - $3000 range, spending $50 bucks or so for an occasion might not be a bad idea.

Renting high-end bags is probably not something that will appeal to everyone of course, but it's good to see a local Seattle startup get featured in a major movie. Good for them :)

Fractional ownership itself is an interesting business. It really spans all different markets. For example, http://www.yachtlease.com/ is a Seattle company that is basically a time share for boats. A lot of similar types of companies can be found in this article (http://www.entrepreneur.com/management/operations/article185396.html).

I wonder if this idea of fractional ownership/renting will catch on more? It's funny, in some sense, this wave of cloud-based services can be thought of as something similar. For example, you could look at Amazon EC2 and think of it as renting computational power and Amazon S3 as renting hard drive space. Why buy these costly, rapidly depreciating items when you can just rent them :) Maybe computers and $3000 Prada bags have something in common after all :)

Anyways, just a random post on a Saturday afternoon. Talk to you later.

Eric.