O2O — Online-to-Offline: A Sales Model With Tremendous Opportunities

Yael as a Penn alum and I as a Wharton alum attended an LA event sponsored by the Wharton MBA Program for Executives in San Francisco.

At the event, Wharton professor David Bell presented research on the opportunities of supplying offline products through selling exclusively online.

He talked about diapers.com, which was just bought by Amazon, as an example of this sales model of supplying products for Preferential Minorities.

A Preferential Minority is someone who likes a specific product that cannot be bought in his/her neighborhood or region because enough other people do not want this product to make it worthwhile for area stores to use some of their finite shelf space on which to sell the product.

Therefore, online stores spring up to satisfy the desires of Preferential Minorities found among an entire country like the U.S., for example.

Professor Bell is talking about what is referred to in the world of online marketing as niche markets for products and services.

There may not be a lot of demand for Product X in one city. But aggregating all the demand for Product X across a country may result in a large enough buying market to motivate an online company to supply that demand.

Diapers.com is an example of an online company that did just this for Preferential Minorities of specific diaper brands and other related baby paraphernalia.

How does this O2O model relate to you? It may not. On the other hand you just may have the urge to satisfy a Preferential Minority. You can sell online to satisfy specific offline desires.

And if you are interested in learning about the Wharton MBA Executive Program in San Francisco, check out www.wharton.upenn.edu/mbaexecutive



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Phyllis Zimbler Miller (@ZimblerMiller on Twitter) and her business partner Yael K. Miller (@MillerMosaicLLC on Twitter) are committed to taking the mystery out of social media so that individuals and companies can utilize the power of social media to attract more business.

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