Friday, February 22, 2008

Sales of Obamaphernalia as a Function of Candidate Popularity



I've been a little obsessed with my Zazzle sales lately, specifically, the precipitous drop off in my Zazzle sales. On February 3rd I create two or three t-shirt designed using quote from Barack Obama's speeches. These shirts sold like hotcakes through about the 10th. Then they've tanked. Why? I took a look at Gallup's daily poll to see if there was some sort of connection between the Obama's popularity among Democrats and my drop in sales. Maybe people buy underdog t-shirts (well, not literally), but when their candidate stops being an underdog, they stop buying. What do you think?

Click here to return to Gnomicon home page

2 comments:

Scholeologist said...

Math geek needs a y-axis. How big are the numbers here? If it's a drop from 5-10 to 0-1, then there's not enough data to justify much.

If I had to guess, I'd say that part of it is newness buzz -- people came across your shirt when they were watching the will.i.am video and/or it was high on zazzle's new stuff, and now it's not new, the video's not new, so there's less traffic in Obama quotage.

Maybe after Texas/Ohio he'll do a kickin' speech and you can harvest fresh quotes.

Sarah said...

I didn't want to put the y-axis on there because, well, it would reveal how very insignificant my sales are. :)
On my best day I made 11 sales and a total value of $173.50.

I considered the freshness factor and have been adding a new item a day since February 2nd. On reason the value of sales may have dropped is that I added pins and bumper stickers which started selling more units (for a lot less money) than t-shirts.