Using Clusters to Increase Market Share using Videogames as an Example
It’s no doubt that there are millions of people interested in gaming out there, and it’s no doubt that huge corporations like Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo are trying to tap into that market with their various products like the Xbox One, PS4, and WiiU (respectively). As we all know, these companies are constantly advertising their products, running huge promotions, introducing new features, etc. They are constantly trying to one up each other in order to increase sales and get people to buy their products. However, what I find to be one of the most important factors to get me to buy a console, especially during the holidays, is friends.
A lot of us have our friend groups, or clusters, each with their own varying density (some of my clusters are incredibly dense with each one of the friends knowing each other since middle school, while some of my other clusters are friends that I hang out with after classes, but not necessarily on weekends at social events). For one of my high-school based clusters, we all have Xboxs. This originated because one of the friend got an Xbox from his uncle for Christmas, and he invited us all over to play with him on the Xbox and check it out. This kind of advertising within the friend cluster quickly spread throughout the cluster in one pass since our cluster was tightly connected, and we all got to try out the Xbox at the same time and see its entertainment value.
This then influenced everyone within that cluster to invest in an Xbox, and we can imagine that this kind of interaction is incredibly common for the millions of gamer clusters out there. When one friend in a tight cluster gets interested in a product and tells all of his or her friends to check it out, then that whole cluster will soon adopt that same idea. The question is, can these companies make their products enticing enough to get just one friend inside each of these millions of clusters adopt their idea or product and later on get the others within their clusters to adopt that same idea or product?
As we see in the article linked below, both Sony and Microsoft are running as many promotions, deals, bundles, and features as they can to make their products more enticing. Not only that, but we see an avalanche of these deals during the holiday season since that is when most gamers do their shopping. If these companies can make their products so attractive that it is able to make just a single node in each of these clusters adopt the product, then the rest of the advertisement and sales is done for them. Sony has done a more successful job of infiltrating clusters than Xbox has at the moment, mostly because of their famous franchise exclusives and also more powerful hardware. However, this was only Black Friday, and we’ll have to wait some time to see how the fight fares out over the rest of the holiday season in which company can spread their products across the nodes the quickest?
http://www.idigitaltimes.com/ps4-vs-xbox-one-black-friday-2015-playstation-sales-win-despite-microsofts-best-494403