Basking Robbins started out with 21 flavors, and in 1953 it went to 31 flavors to compete against Howard Johnson’s 28 flavors. Burt Baskin and Irv Robbins believed in customer satisfaction and by offering the iconic pink spoon to sample all 31 flavors, the customer is allowed to find the flavor that suits their craving. This can be applied to what websites are offering today; by offering everything to the user, the website hopes to keep them and and to satisfy each user’s cravings.

From Vanilla to Passion Fruit

The best sites offer enough choices to satisfy everyone’s cravings, and to not limit them by offering developers their open source software. Facebook and MySpace does this, Apple does it by opening up the iPhone App Store. Twitter allows you free range to explore other’s microblogs and to express yourself in an easy user interface and by allowing others to create applications for the Twitter user (ie. Tweetdeck, Twirl, and so on). The reason why Baskin Robbins, Facebook and MySpace are successes are because they know and care about their customer base. By letting the users have options and not fencing them in and by giving them a spoon/easy UI to sample all the offerings, they retain their customers/users.

Rocky Road

On the flip side, the websites that paste together the greatest hits from other sites, so that they can be the “be all and end all” fail because they are trying to fill a void that has been filled a hundred times over by other similar sites. They will get an initial hit at the beginning from early adopters (the ones that will also go to an opening of an envelope), but those users are as loyal as a feral cat. The sites are left to slowly wither on the vine and disappear into the digital dust bin. For example: Yahoo 360, Walmart’s teen social networking site, iYomu the adult social networking site; all wanted to be like MySpace and Facebook, but they offered the same flavors but with bad execution. A clone is a clone is a clone.

Mint Chocolate Chip

So what’s next? Invent a new flavor and define that small niche market that wants only that “flavor”; which means realizing that numbers is not the game anymore. It is serving that one niche and doing it well. Then you can define in exact terms what they will buy and who will advertise. Create your “flavor” and build a website for it, you will then find quite a few out there that will also love it as well. Mine is Rum Raisin.

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