Notes
- For a general history of fashion designs, see Steele (1997).
- Cf. with the story of the, in many respects similar but somewhat later, commercial success of the Sony Walkman (Gay et al. 1997)
- In their study on fads and fashions, Meyersohn and Katz (1957: 598) referred to urban bohemia as a cultural laboratory in which something new can be tried out. Similarly, fashion historians have paid attention to the various youth sub-cultures as creative milieus of experimenting with new designs and models. Schiffer’s (1993) restricted constituencies, with their true believers in their own ‘cultural imperative’, in the desirability and need of a certain product, can play a similar role. What unites the urban bohemians, youth sub-cultures and constituencies of technical inventions is that all kinds of new ideas and products can be tried out in them without great harm for or impact on society at large.
- More recently, Best (2006) analysed fads in social institutions like management, education and medicine.
- It is an interesting question, which I am not able to take up in this chapter in any great detail, where such product differentiation due to technical improvements should be placed. In the case of the colour TV, for instance, it would be difficult to claim that this was a real innovation compared to its black and white predecessor since it hardly created any radically different, new cultural habits or routines. But quite early on it created a new market of its own, distinct from the market of the old black and white TVs.
- As some researchers claim, internet marketing has changed this old rule. With diminishing sales expenses and greater access, sales statistics have extended to include an increasing range of lesser-selling products (the so-called ‘long tail phenomenon; see Anderson 2006; Falk 2007).
References
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• Jukka Gronow