Tuning - mass niche for brick and mortar
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Created 232 days ago, Updated 224 days ago
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Although the Internet was a critical platform for the mass niche phenomenon in clothing industry, mass niche does not have to be limited in online commerce. If demand for diversity is strong, any industry will adapt to grab the opportunity. Now, it is time to think about the possibility of mass niche in brick-and-mortar industries. Will creative individuals and small businesses have any stake in the hometown of mass producers?
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Tuning, in general, means altering or improving function, performance or exteriors. The industry in which tuning is most commonly used is cars. When we searched ‘tuning’(in Korean) at Naver, we got about 300 websites. It is likely there are more than 300 stores and communities considering some stores and communities may not have websites or may not be listed in Naver. Here is a list of sites that we found on the first page of the search result.
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- Hi tuning: specialized tuning, tuned car video clips and gallery, tuning info, car flee market, blulletine board
- Tuning world; car tuning and accessories, filters, mufflers, suspension, engines, breaks, turbo wheel tires
- My style car: car accessories, interior and exterior goods, tuning and DIY, stickers
- Drift: car racing techniques, car tuning seminar, sports vehicle news, vehicle imports manuals
- PC4CAR: car PC community, pictures of PC for car, Q&A board by parts, sketcher, circuit diagrams, technical manuals
- Ixion design: spoilers, air dams, dress-up tuning specialized, car accessory shoppingmall
- New beetles club: Volkswagen New Beetle tuning information, tuning tips, tuning manual, New Beetle accessories, tuning Q&A, photo gallery
- R sonic: car tuning, racing communities
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There are dress-up tuning and performance tuning. Dress-up tuning is changing cars’ interior and exterior designs, like replacing steering wheels and seat covers and installing air dams and spoilers. Performance tuning is to improve speed or cornering performance by reconstructing engines or mufflers. Often, changes like replacing tires affect both exterior and performance of cars. Installing air dams and spoiler may look like only affecting car’s exterior, but it can also affect the performance.
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Why do people tune their cars? To simply improve performance? To look more cool? True, but you could buy a new (including used) car if that was the only reason. There are nice-looking cars in the market. If you want to drive faster, then you can buy a faster car. Buying a new car costs you money, but if you tune your car you need to spend some (often quite a lot) additional money anyway. And remember that you would have sold your old car, if you had bought a new car. A more compelling explanation is that you want to personalize a car than just to have a better car.
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It is said there were 40 different types of cars in 1960’s in the US and now there seem to be around 300 different models available for sale according to cars.com. Taking different versions into account, let’s say there are 1,000 kinds of cars. That is quite a variety. But if thousands and millions of people want to express their individuality, there are too many people driving the same cars. These days, you rarely see someone who is wearing the same clothes, but it is difficult not to see the same car as yours driven by someone else (unless you own a very old car). Therefore, the only option left for someone who wants individuality is tuning.
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The market of car tuning is already quite big. According to Mail daily (2006-07-20), the market size is estimated as $1 billion. In case of Japan, the market size is around $25 billion. Another factor that implied substantial market potential was mentioned in the same article. In a survey of owner drivers in the age of 20~50, 5% said they have experienced tuning but 25% answered they had considered tuning.
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Tuning exists not only in car industry, which has been around quite some time, but also in other industries like cellular phone. When we searched cellular phone tuning on Naver, the result came up with 19 sites with descriptions like ‘specialized in cellular phone tuning, remodeling, stickers, coating, coloring, tuning gallery and tuning start-up information’. There were more than 10 thousand Q&A’s when I searched on Naver’s KnowledgeiN.
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Cellular phone tuning involves changing colors or adding patterns on exteriors and key pads. Like car tuning, it is all about expressing individuality. Even though there are many different kinds of cellular phones available in the market, they are just not varied enough. There are too many people owning the same kind of phones as yours. You need to tune your mobile phone if you want your phone to be truly unique.
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Some people tune their shoes as well. A typical shoes tuning is drawing on white sneakers. Car tuning is usually done by specialists, but shoes tuning seems to be done more by consumers themselves than by companies. Maybe because it requires less technical competency, or maybe it is a matter of time before we see shoes tuning specialists.
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Shoes tuning started as a kind of underground culture but it came overground when the heroin wore and gave tuned shoes as a gift in ‘Palace’, a popular TV series. Now its popularity made some mainstream shoes makers adopt the culture. ABC Mart, Nike and Adidas started offering tuning shoes in the market, and some companies like nonamesmall emerged, who mainly sell plain canvas shoes that they have tuned themselves or according to customer requests. The number of Q&As on shoes tuning in Naver was also over several tens of thousands, which was about as many as in the cellular phone tuning.
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If we define tuning as ‘modifying existing products to fit one’s taste’, tuning is quite broad. There is tuning in online clothing that we have looked at. According to Jisoo Park, she hardly designs clothing she sells, but frequently modifies existing products. Online fashion boutiques would put on graphics, wear and tear jeans, change buttons, etc.
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Even interior design, which is growing a lot faster than traditional furniture industry, is nothing but a home (or office) tuning. In Korea, more than 50% of all houses are in apartment buildings. If you live in an apartment, you can differentiate your home from your neighborhood’s only by modifying your interior. Some would just change the color of walls, but more and more middle-class Korean home buyers would likely to go through a few weeks of remodeling only to live 2-3 years there. Just like car tuning, this involves form as well as function. The size of interior market is known to be around $10 billion, in which home interior segment is about 1.8 billion, and is expected to grow at around 10%.
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Further, when you search tuning on the Internet, we can also find Ramen tuning, textbook tuning, and school uniform tuning. They can hardly called a market yet, but they could be in the future. If people tune their shoes, why not Ramen?
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test
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Now, let’s think about UCC videos for a moment. There are concerns that unlike what they are called, user-created contents are not user-created. They estimate that only 10% could be categorized as user created. The industry leaders debate on how to improve this. Do people only like the mainstream? Or our legal system is too soft on the copyright issue? Or people just don’t have good ideas to create something interesting?
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But, copying might not be the antonym of creating. If you captured a scene of a movie star making a funny face during a TV show, is that copying? Yes, of course. But does it have some creative element? I think so. You did more than just uploading the entire show. To capture those 5 seconds (even without altering any thing else), there was a flash of ideas in your mind that it will be funny. And you thought about cutting from where to where. It is a crude form of editing, which is a creative task.
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People may argue that it is not ‘original’. But what is truly original? Invention is original, and discovery isn’t? I agree that we feel something is more original than others, but there is no clear division. Many people find it difficult to write something from scratch, but they easily comment under an article. The article is perhaps more original, but the comments are creative products as well. If people can tune or add or remix, but not originate, give them materials to tune rather than tell them to stay as spectators.
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From this point, existing contents are good raw materials to be tuned for UCCs. So, content holders had better consider providing their contents (for fees or for free) and embrace the tuning/remixing creativity of people. That might be more economical than protecting your copyrighted contents which is very hard and costly. While I talked about this idea, I was skeptical anyone would do it. But I was surprised to see a news that George Lucas’s Star Wars was provided publicly for video mash-up. I wish Korean companies paid attention to this.
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If we think about it, it is natural. People do what they are capable of doing. You cannot make a new car, but you can change the steering wheel or a tire for your Hyundai car. It is difficult to make shoes only for you, but you can buy a pair of shoes and paint on it. Mass niche is based on creativity of crowds, not a few geniuses. The bar should be lower. It needs to be easy. So, where you think mass niche is difficult, think tuning. And that is just the start. As all history of innovation shows, they won’t stop at the surface. They will dig deeper and deeper, and may change the material itself someday .
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