The Blowout Brush Bananza
Ladies and gentlemen, I anticipate what you are probably thinking when you start reading this article, "Why is Christian talking about hair products and showing a picture of people using them in a job website?"
It's for a good reason.
It's to show how big time companies make bank off of customers buying certain products based on social media trends. This is in relation to a master's thesis that I have completed years ago, which is based off of the Minority Game in mathematics and economics.
The Minority Game History
For my master's thesis, I dug my research into a mathematical and economical concept called the Minority Game. No, the minority game does not involve race, gender, age, disability, or even ethnicity. The Minority Game is basically a game consisting of a minimum of three players who choose one out of two options. Being in the minority of the group wins. The Minority Game was created by Yi-Cheng Zhang and Damien Challet and is based upon the Swiss children’s game, Zig-Zag-Zoug and the El Farol Bar problem by W. Brian Arthur. The El Farol Bar problem measures the activity of bar goers or club goers inside the bar or club. In the problem the bar is very small and it becomes an uncomfortable vibe if the bar is too crowded. Consequently, if less than 60% of bar goers go to the bar, they will have a better time than if they stayed at home. However, if more than 60% of bar goers attend, it will be the complete opposite. Below, I have generated a randomized model of bar goers attending. There are 500 agents (bar goers) attending over a period of 500 days. If the attendance is over 300 people, which is the threshold, the agents will not enjoy the bar.
There is ALWAYS an irrational outcome because no one agent knows the expectation models of any other agent (no one agent knows what any other agent will do). The expectations are hypocritical: if all agents believe most will go to the club, none of the agents will go, invalidating that theory. The game is intrinsically dynamic, historic, and fun because people will always reassess their chances of success. There are five key assumptions of the game:?
For my thesis, I simulated the Minority Game in real life with actual people. I focused on the beauty industry that has a heavily saturated market. Anything that basically involves looking good, feeling good, or making money will ALWAYS have a market saturation, which can be proven using the minority game method. Therefore, I focused on hair care products that women like to use and I modeled their decision-making based on that using the information I received from them. I'll discuss more on my work of the minority game at the end of this article. In the meantime, let's dig into the haircare industry.
Using The Hair Care Industry As An Example
The hair care industry as a whole is a holy grail for major companies to make a boatload of money, not just the hair care industry but the beauty and toiletry industry overall. The toiletry industry is mainly extremely personal in some ways depending on how you shake it, especially for the women that are consumers in that industry. According to the statistics from Forbes in 2019, women control or influence 85% of consumer spending.
The hair care industry is no different. This is why you see marketers all over the world create mathematical strategies to appease women that dictate consumer spending in order to make a profit for their company. Companies in decades past would pay millions of dollars in advertising to make hilarious commercials to target consumers, even if they consist of actions that are extremely edgy. You will see a commercial like this below to appease the masses into running into the stores and buying their products to make their companies millions of dollars.
Fast forward to today, you will see much of the advertising done on social media without companies shedding a single dime. Women today are promoting products to others that are watching in the hopes that they could buy those said products.
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Monitoring every single transaction to the companies in the hair care industry is extremely difficult unless you have thousands of dollars to buy datasets from third parties that monitor the industry's actual performance. Even if you do acquire those datasets, it can be very difficult to monitor future performance from various products based on consumer interests, which can randomize over a period. For a lot of women in this case, they will tend to stay loyal with the products that they're using, unless they have a special event to go to or they're influenced by their closest friends to try something new and later stick with those new products. Especially when it comes to revolutionary hair blowout brushes.
Digging Into The Blowout Brush Bananza
So the crave that has been flooding social media as of recent are the revolutionary hair blowout brushes.
According to the consumers that use it, they claim that it helps speed up their drying time and preserves their hair from being damaged over time during styling. In addition, they feel that they are now contenders to audition for another hair modeling gig.
I'm not going to discuss about product promotion. But, what I will discuss is how I utilized web scraping in Python to analyze what is the hottest blowout brush to acquire on Amazon.
Below are links where you have seen me scrape the Amazon website to acquire the data. I would like to give a huge thank you to Mr. Darshil Parmar for teaching me how to web scrape on Amazon.
And these are the results that I have found. I've modeled the outcomes using Tableau.
Further Information
Now that all of the results have been presented, my hope is to present the general public on which item can soothe their needs as well as making sure the public understands a small glimpse of how transactions are made and how money flows from the consumer to various companies. If you would like to dig further into my thesis of the minority game, please direct message me or comment below and I will provide an attachment link. If you would like to see how the minority game works in person, please direct message me and we will talk about certain specifics that are needed as well as possible tailoring toward your comfort level so that the game could benefit you, should you choose to partake in it. Thank you very much for reading this article as it is a very deep one. I hope to hear back from you soon. Enjoy your work week.