When I started StyleHop last year, one of my friends in acadamia shared Duncan Watts seminal work that essentially debunked the concept that marketers can predict hits by looking to the “influentials” in their product categories.  Watts revisits this topic in Sunday’s Washington Post article: So You Can’t Pick the Hits.  Neither Can Anyone Else:

Why is predicting so difficult?  Well, for lots of reasons, but two fundamental ones stand out. First, individuals are much harder to predict than they seem, not because people are infinitely complex, but because how we are apt to behave depends on subtle details of the situation.

The most interesting part of Watt’s work was his collaboration with Matthew Salganik and Peter Dodds to explore how certain songs become hits.  Here is what he found:

When participants knew what others liked, the popular songs became more popular and the unpopular songs less popular than when people made their choices independently. More surprisingly, however, we found that which particular songs become the most popular also became more unpredictable — in some cases social influence caused luck and randomness to overtake intrinsic appeal as the main factors driving success.

In the fashion industry, there has always been a strong belief that some individuals have near divine powers to predict what will be hot.  What we find over time, however, is that this almost never plays out unless the predictor has become a truetastemaker or brand unto themselves.  In other words, some individuals like Mickey Drexler, Ralph Lauran and Anna Wintour become so broadly followed that they in fact do have enormous outsized influence.

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If Watt’s theories are correct, though, the magic fairy dust that helped these three rise to tastemaker status had less to do with their predictive fashion abilities and probably a lot more to do with hard work combined with a lot of luck.  All those buyers and merchants trying to become the next Mickey Drexler may be wasting their time .  The ability of individual merchants to consistently guess in advance of the season what styles will sell in which quantities will never rise much above a mediocre distribution.  Okay, I’m saying it:  Merchants simply can’t see or intuit the subtle nuance that affects consumer decision making in advance nor can they see how the trends will evolve and be accepted as the social influence evolves.

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This is what makes StyleHop’s model so compelling.  Leveraging thousands of real live targeted consumer’s feedback we can improve upon the individual’s merchant’s forecasting ability leveraging the wisdom of the crowd.  Think of it this way, if the ability to predict fashion is a loser’s game (historical markdowns and high variation in sales performance in fashion support this) then wouldn’t it be better to just ask a large number of the target consumer which items they would like?  By the way, consumer products companies like Procter & Gamble have been doing this market research for decades prior to new product launches.

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Longer term, with traction in the consumer marketplace, StyleHop’s model will be reinforced through the social influence Watts discovered.  Think of StyleHop like the leaderboard in Watt’s music study - directly influencing consumer behavior by showing consumer’s which items other folks have already said are great styles.  Imagine hangtags, in-store signage (or better yet geo-location iphone updates) highlighting the top-ranked StyleHop styles while you shop.  This peer validation, in my view, is more relevant and targeted than any fashion editorial in the magazines today.  Women would love to know that other real women like a particular style before they buy it.

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Would love comments if you have them.