A beleza de Mongo

A beleza de Mongo, a minha metáfora preferida, está em permitir coisas como esta:

"If you started a made-in-America furniture design business during the financial doldrums of 2009, and have since grown from working out of your house to a dozen-person operation in a 20,000-square-foot facility, you're doing something right. And what Greg Hankerson is doing right is creating very specific furniture that a lot of people want."

Ainda por cima a partir do nada:

"Amazingly, Hankerson started the company in his late '30s with zero furniture design/building experience; his wife needed a table for their patio and Hankerson, who was hosting websites for a living, figured he could save them a few bucks by making one. Having learned to weld from his motocross hobby, he cobbled together a welded base and a repurposed oak top. That piece finished, he then became obsessed with creating improved versions."

Em Mongo we are all weird e, por isso, há cada vez mais nichos e mais nichos. Um dia, a soma de todos os nichos representará um mercado bem superior ao que no passado chamávamos mercado de massas.
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O mercado de massas, normalizado, padronizado... tão século XX, pós II Guerra Mundial é cada vez mais uma coisa do passado.
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Estranho, aparecer neste blogue a citar Krugman, mas um Krugman técnico, não o político dos nossos dias, talvez seja a altura de se começar a estudar um pouco mais da economia da primeira metade do século XX, com toda a sua diversidade.

"Imagine a sector whose product is differentiated. Suppose that every variety is produced with increasing returns to scale. Also assume that these economies of scale are relatively small so that the industry can accommodate many producers, each one producing a different variety.
Then, following Chamberlin (1933), it is natural to expect in this industry a market structure known as monopolistic competition; that is, every firm chooses a variety and its pricing so as to maximize profits, taking as given the variety choice and pricing strategy of the other producers in the industry. In this case every firm ends up producing a different variety of the product.

Now imagine a demand structure within which there is a taste for variety.

This may arise either because people like variety or because every person likes a particular product but different people like different products. Then for every pair of countries that actively produce varieties of the good, we should expect to observe intraindustry trade. Under monopolistic competition, which is the natural market structure under these circumstances, each country will produce different varieties of the product, while every variety is demanded in both countries. Hence differentiated products provide a simple explanation of intraindustry trade." (Moi ici: Substituam "countries" por empresas, por empreendimentos, por projectos e temos Mongo, e temos, por exemplo a coexistência pacífica entre calçado português e chinês, ambos de vento em poupa, cada um trabalhando para os seus clientes-alvo com diferentes gostos)

E como é que a sua empresa está a tratar a sua capacidade de se diferenciar?
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Trecho retirado de "Market Structure and Foreign Trade - Increasing Returns, Imperfect Competition, and the International Economy" de Elhanan Helpman e Paul Krugman (1985).