2 items in the news today for customer-centric comment.

1. Lululemon IPO
2. Wal-Mart to Sell Bible Toys.

1. Lululemon IPO has created a capital valuation of $2.2 billion for a company of $149 million p.a. revenue. Shades of .com myopia? If all the shareholders were customers, oh what a joy that would be (see earlier blog of same title). At $28/share I have a choice - to buy two shares or one yoga outfit. To buy the shares, there is no greater statement of customer loyalty: I will raise generations of Lululemon kids founded on the integrity of a yoga lifestyle and a commitment to these products - may we all live long and prosper. But, who am I kidding? This is not a customer play, it is a speculator play, betting on increasing divorce rates, higher work-stress loads and retiring boomers looking to fill their void in tranquillity.

But, I think Lululemon is built on customer-centric values, not mass-market hype. It appeals to a segment of the adult market that shares the common life values that it espouses in its manifesto and retains loyalty and revenue stability in those demographic centres that contain a sufficiently large population of this market segment.

I predict this IPO will be the death knell of Lululemon in its current form. Its niche market will frustrate shareholders that expect high volume performance and force it to become a mass-market merchant, devaluing all those tenets that made it appealing in the first place. Let's see what it looks like in 5 years.

Its owner will be richer, which begs the question - are all ideals for sale? And will the Lululemon customers whose ideals were sold enjoy the fruits of the people that bought them up?

2. Wal-Mart will start to sell action hero figures on biblical themes. There will be the usual good guy/bad guy mix: Goliath vs. Samson. The strategy is to encourage children to appreciate that Spiderman and the green goblin represent the most reprehensible forms of violence, whereas biblical stories have a moral and spiritual imperative. It is perhaps a valid response to the upsurge in the rate of violent crime and bullying committed by pre-teens and teenage kids.

As a spiritual person I wanted to leap on this idea with an Almighty "Yes!", so I was surprised by my knee-jerk impulse to say "No!"

Here are my concerns:

-) Will this encourage children of different faith to adopt a more aggressive attitude towards religion? Action figures are for action, so will Mohammed attack Moses or Jesus zaps the High Priests at some point in the evolution of this form of child-play? However, Spiderman represents a non-denominational battle of good against evil. He and Batman and a whole bunch of superheroes I grew up with gave me a pretty good sense of right/wrong and crime/punishment.

-) I don't attach blame to Marvel or DC comics for teenage violence. In comics the bad guys always lose in the end, whereas teen violence is always started by the bad guys. So they are not cueing from Spiderman for their malevolence. It is the gratuitous violence of video games and prime-time media bears greater responsibility for such problems.

-) The Bible isn't just about being nice and polite. There is suffering and persecution throughout. These are lessons that need sensitive treatment before young minds start to create fantasies in their games about what Egyptians can do to Hebrew slaves, or what Romans can do to Christian martyrs.

I don't like the thought of religion being blatantly used to align customers in a mass-market merchandising program. It makes money, it appeals to a core segment with common values, it sounds customer-centirc, but there is a fine line between sharing values and leveraging them for commercial gain. If you don't want your children to play violent games with action heroes, guns, whatever, then your responsibility is to give your children more creative activities, not to substitute the characters so that your kids can now use their Samson to beat up their friend's Wolverine. And, in a multi-cultural society, religious icon toy heroes can aggravate the dissonance between different religious values - yet one more reason for Tommy not to play at Khasim's house. One has to see the further-reaching consequences before you blindly put your own religious values barefaced into the mainstream marketplace.

I would rather have a fictional hero represent those values I respect in a non-sectarian way, for those who share the same values purchase them for these reasons. Superheros are non-denominational, which is why a fervent believer might react against them.

I recognize that my children have to let off some aggressive steam, preferably through their toys than at each other. Which brings me back to why I always liked Spiderman...