I have a feeling someone at Amazon has also read The Tipping Point or at least one of the studies it talks about. I forget which it was (I’ll try to remember to look it up and come back with an update), but I recall Malcolm Gladwell, the author, discussing the ad campaign of a company that managed to significantly increase its sales by adding a little treasure box to its advertisements. (I think it was a mail-order music sales company.) Amazon now has a little treasure box of its own. If you click on it, you get some sale items that are only on sale for sixty minutes. It’s an interesting idea. Unfortunately, that’s about as clever as they got. The recommendations, although seemingly customized based on your prior purchases and interest, have absolutely nothing to do with me whatsoever. I now check them out more for kicks than anything else. In any case, I thought this was an interesting coinkidinky.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 20th, 2002 at 9:28 pm and is filed under Books, Products/Services. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.