Funko Pop Culture
https://www.licenseglobal.com/magazine-article/funko-pop-culture-purveyors
Funko, a company dedicated to making collectible figures based on pop culture, provides a fascinating example of using networks for monetary gain. By striving to obtain more licenses than any other company (see licenseglobal.com link), they have been able to market products to a large variety of potential consumers. They have been able to tap into markets for video gaming communities, movie fanatics, comic book enthusiasts, TV show fans, etc. The list goes on! Through this broad expansion, they have continued to grow as a company and become extraordinarily successful.
Due to the broad expansion of this company into different pop culture subgroups, they have been able to circumvent the potential restrictions due to clusters. They have been able to market their products to almost all of the potential clusters in social networks, thus not restricting their market! This is apparent when you see that Funko Pop figures are now in all sorts of stores, from popular stores like Walmart and Target to even gas stations! Funko does not have to worry about bridges between clusters when they simply market to all of the clusters themselves.
Part of the success of the company is also due to the nature of collectibles.When Funko Pop figures are sold on the market, there are certain circumstances which actually lead to their values skyrocketing. One example of this is Funko Pops sold at various conventions. These tend to be more limited, and harder to obtain. This adds to the drive of collectors to get their hands on these figures, as they can later be extremely hard to get. This makes the initial sale for these products generally pretty easy. As a figure becomes harder to obtain, there are few second hand sellers for buyers to find. If we think of these as nodes, we can see that these sellers make up very few nodes, and they have a lot of selling power. This is why figures which sold at retail for twelve dollars can later increase in value to hundreds dollars! According to finder.com, these figures have an average return on investment of 442%! There, they also note that event exclusivity is an important factor in this.
All in all, Funko has done an extraordinary job of making use of pop culture and all of its subgroups to market their products. By intentionally making some of their products more limited then others, they have also increased buyers’ desires to buy them, since they know the values could increase dramatically.