![]() They had no goats or traps, and thus no kids. They had never played Doom or Mario or some other competitive team video game. They had never built a server from scratch. They were adult men, but behaved like children. Most of them were best described as "manchildren". Their entire culture and mindset revolved around wearing sports logos on their clothing. They filled their desks with other "sproty" trinkets. I used to work with some folks who wore those "sporty" types of t-shirts on a daily basis. That's what made ThinkGeek successful in the first place - they catered to the niche. The broader audience already has tons of places to get this kind of stuff. That's how you continually advance your company, not by cutting off your existing customers in the hopes that you'll appeal to a broader audience. Or they could have stepped into different but similar markets, like a competitor for Drop or a custom merchandising company like Shopify or TeeSpring. Hell, they probably could have called it ThinkWeeb and gotten even more popular for it. Could you imagine if ThinkAnime came out 5 years ago and catered to all the weeaboos and otakus out there? They'd have never had to sell to GameSpot, weebs will buy so much of that garbage it boggles the mind. ThinkSports could have a bunch of stuff real sports nerds might love to have, but can be hard to find even in traditional sports merchandise shops. But it still looks for aquatic animals to eat.Ī better way for ThinkGeek to expand would be to spin off other "Think" branded apparel/curio websites, like ThinkSports or ThinkAnime, and catering to the niche markets in those genres. It looks for new fish in a new area, or maybe it tries eating an octopus. It moves forward by looking for more of the same kinds of things it's always consumed. This is a common failure of these kinds of analogies.Ī shark doesn't move forward by ripping out its gills and trying to breathe air, hoping that somehow it will suddenly be able to eat all the plant matter on land. The shark analogy isn't wrong, but it must be applied correctly.
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