How to truly understand what the market really wants, #1 of 2: Zooming

Taking a page from Freaky Friday, the only way one can completely understand a teenager if you’re a mom, and vice versa, is to become the other.  Business guru Seth Godin refers to this as *zooming.

For those who wish to understand the CoolTown market:  Unless you’re willing to try living in the city and/or giving up your car for a month, emptying out your bank account and hanging out and conversing with an entirely

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What? Only 20% of the market follow through?

The industry average says only 20% of potential home buyers who put a refundable $1000 deposit on a future community (that they have some say in), end up buying.

Using my favorite principle of Occam’s Razor (the simplest answer is usually the right one), that means only 20% of them got what they really wanted.  Of course, using the Industrial Economy Developer’s Razor, that means 80% of them didn’t know what they really wanted.

Take it even

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Myth: The market doesn’t really know what they want

There’s probably no more over-used philosophy in product development.

You’d think this would apply to fashion, yet Blue Cult’s new jeans are insanely popular because women feel they’re finally being listened to, while individually customized jeans and even shoes are fast becoming the norm.

It’s bad enough in general, but rather disastrous when applied to building communities.  For instance, another product that “we didn’t know we

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Q&A: Shouldn’t people come before buildings?

As a civic/community-building practitioner, I often observe a disconnect in how communities approach initiatives to create vibrant places. For instance, the popular place-based initiatives… with new urbanist designs often overlook the necessary visioning work on ‘softer’ issues, viewing (instead) the physical changes as the essential ingredients in community transformation. How will CoolTown integrate civic/community-building aspects within its

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Make your own rules

When you have an abundance of local culture, you start breaking mass-traditions in favor of something more meaningful.

Hawaii is well known locally as almost being another country since its diversity of food, customs and even conversation language is so unique compared to the mainland United States.  This pervasive diversity breeds an openness to new ideas, where it’s not so much that one of the signs pictured here reflects the local cowboy community in this central

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Have it your way - your town that is

The business system by the economy will evolve where we will see customer-driven products and services as a basic expectation is called mass customization - a “system of combining the low unit costs of mass production processes with the flexibility of individual customization.”

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A cool town is truly people-driven

What makes a CoolTown unique is that the people who will actually live and work there get to be involved in its design from the very beginning.  Fair huh?  Typically today, a community’s stakeholders use the charrette to plan the town from the ground up.  Once the project is approved by the City several months later, only then would it be marketed to future tenants, already designed.

Now, suppose a number of employers desired a main street of loft offices,

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