Ok so this not tech related , but just about half of the way through my work day my Friday work day at Cacao Coffee in WestLA, I had a run in with a street sock salesman who sparked a little thought. I actually ran into this same guy 3 miles west at Nikki’s Beach in Venice a few weeks back. My friends and I were having a drink, when this guy came up to me, white tube socks in hand, saying “you buy, you buy!”
Our cocktail induced conversation quickly shifted from whatever it was, to several hypotheticals:
“Is he selling socks as part of some type of a pyramid scheme?”
“Is he buying socks at bulk and selling them on the street?”
Regardless, It seems like sock sales is a fairly commoditized industry. So how successful could he really be selling this product our of context? It seems, at least in this instance, like a comodatized product is even more ridiculous if sold out of context. If you think about it, however, there are several online markets that struggle with a similarly competitive and non contextually relevant sale -*cough* affiliate marketing. Yet those markets do just fine. Similar to the latest Acai Berry offer on Yahoo weather, a sock solicitation at the coffee shop or at the bar, seems like hardly a contextually relevant place to make a sale. So why?? Moreover, does context really matter in marketing?
Probably.
Assuming that since, today he was walking west, and the last time I saw him, he was near the Venice boardwalk, his primary market probably consists of shoeless(and sockless) folks at the beach. That would make me a secondary market. Or perhaps even just an opportunistic sale. It seems like this guy may have something figured out after all. Which puts him a…foot…ahead of several companies that haven’t found their market yet.
To the Street Sock Salesmen of Santa Monica, I cant knock the hustle buddy.
