Download Brief Fads Dominate Toy Industry

Brief Fads Dominate Toy Industry
S-Curves and Novelty
My name is Christy Ushijima, and my chapter is titled, “Brief Fads Dominate Toy
Industry.” The article does not really say much about the toy industry itself, but
actually discusses a concept called the S-curve, which the author says seems to
describe the growth of things as diverse as “Mozart’s symphony production, the
rise of airline traffic, new mainframe computer installations, and the building of
Gothic cathedrals,” as well as fads in the toy industry.
The S-curve looks like this…
The author explains the shape of the S-curve using the growth of bacteria in a
petri dish as an example. At first, the number of bacteria increases “at a rapid
exponential rate” because there is plenty of room, and lots of nutrients for the
bacteria to feed on. But as the number of bacteria grows larger and larger, space
in the dish and the nutrients available get used up, so the “rate of [growth] slows,
and the number of bacteria stabilizes.”
This [] is the point of change on the S-curve. The number of bacteria is still
growing, but the rate at which it is increasing is slowing down.
According to the author, many people have “speculated that there is [some] kind
of universal principle governing many natural and human phenomena” (like
Mozart’s symphony production and fads in the toy industry). They think this
“universal principle” is described by the S-curve—except that there doesn’t seem
to be anything like the nutrients in the petri dish that is being used up to cause
the rate of growth in these things to slow down. However, the author suggests
that what is being depleted over time is our sense of novelty.
When something is new, unusual or dramatic, there is a lot of interest in it. This
could be expressed in a whole lot of reports on a particularly sensational news
item, or a sudden increase in the demand for a new and unusual product.
However, as our sense of novelty is used up, these phenomena taper off in a
relatively short amount of time. There are a lot of examples of this in the toy
industry—sea monkeys, tamagotchis [virtual pets], pogs, rubik’s cubes, and
Tickle-Me Elmos to name just a few.
Something in my own life seems to illustrate the effects of an S-curve. When I
was about three, my parents got rid of our television, so while I did occasionally
watch tv shows and movies when I was at my friends’ or relatives’ houses, I
rarely watched tv while I was growing up. Consequently, whenever I had an
opportunity to watch tv, my friends always got bored with the show or movie long
before I did. However, once my family actually had a tv in our house, the novelty
was soon depleted, and the amount of tv I wanted to watch also decreased.