market my world

i was looking up the Online Fashion Marketing Blog and came across this really interesting blog post – theshoppingforecast.com reveals fashion trends for winter 2010 as voted for by the public.  this blog post was introducing a new service; essentially, theshoppingforecast.com is a website that allows consumers to vote for what they want to see in stores for the next season.  the clothing is chosen by a “style council” and these garments are items that are easily accessible and affordable to most people, like picks from forever 21, banana republic, and the gap to name a few.  this service really gets me thinking… what’s the purpose of it and who benefits from it the most?

most of the time, the trends we see on the runway are translated into a less elaborated version that is sold at the local shopping mall so that ordinary people can follow a trend yet still not looking too over the top.  theshoppingforecast.com provides a great place for an exchange: consumers provide their opinions on what they want to buy for the next season and retailers can take that information and try to accommodate their consumers’ preferences.  this information can eliminate retailers and marketer’s uncertainty on trying to predict the consumers’ buying decisions.  so i was thinking, if consumers can input their buying behaviour into a website like theshoppingforecast.com, can this eliminate or reduce the need for psychographical segmentation (which is one of the more useful segmentation bases) because that is what the website ultimately does – the consumers straight up tell their retailers what they want to buy in their stores.  or is this a tactic for segmentation based on psychographics… and it gets me thinking again… what if every industry implements a service like this one?  how would distribution and marketing strategies alter from these changes?