Death of the Video Store

The business and technology world have been chiming about disruptive technologies changing entertainment, media and retail industries for years. With the maturation of the broadband Internet, cheap storage solutions and compression technologies in full bloom, it is apparently coming to fruition. (BTW, great book by Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator's Dilemma)

This hit me recently when a neighborhood video store that had likely been a fixture for more than a decade or two (the video zone), was bulldozed down.

I didn’t become a Netflix member until about a year ago. Now I can’t imagine watching movies without it using its service. My queue is 40+ movies long and I don’t even have to think about it!

I have friends with TIVO and DVRs that don’t equate TV shows with actual program day/time schedules (i.e. what do you mean Survivor is on Thursday’s? I usually catch up on all my TV shows on Saturday afternoons without commercials).

We all know the next step has already been proven by iTunes. Why wait for DVDs in the mail via Netflix? Why wait until a show has been run to record it? Before we know it, we’ll have a little black, wireless box in our closets (probably powered by Google) that we can order and store on demand any media we want….watching/listening/enjoying it on demand, when we want to and how we want to (TV/Computer monitor/remote speakers/mobile device).

Now I wonder what they are going to replace our local video store with?

Good portion of the long tail is now available free: check it out.

What I’m reading

The Ultimate Question

On one of my previous posts I lamented that many companies choose not to do data base marketing. Not even simple 101 stuff. This is such a golden egg.

We’ll in the same vein, I’m realizing how many companies (all sizes) don’t do simple, actionable metrics:

1) Measure the value of their customers
2) Correlate this to the health of their business.

Fred Reichheld’s new book, The Ultimate Question points companies in the right direction. Many might find it rather simplistic, but that is the beauty of Reichheld’s finds. They are simple, impacting and customer focused.

Take a spin on his NPS blog. Also found this related Blog/Link for another take on this book:

I had a strategic marketing professor once tell me a story of what sort of business you want to be in. Those of you who are The Experience Economy by Pine II and Gilmore fans will recognize the laddering….

This guy was in the kitchen stove business back in the ‘80s. He sold a full line of stoves. He was struggling, carry a mix of this and that….from high end to medium and low end and a full price range. Then all of a sudden he experienced a huge sales spike on one particular black, very high end stove. He was having problems keeping it in stock, so he raised the price. It still sold. It sold for a solid year and pushed his business to the next level. He stopped focusing on price and started to carry higher end stoves that the market was asking for.

Why were these stoves selling? Answer: The black stoves were incidentally featured all season long on the very popular T.V. show Dynasty.

What were customers buying? Not stoves, but FANTASY.

What kind of business do you want to be in?

Mystified by Content?

I am still surprised at how many retail websites don’t use there product pages to describe their product? Their “stuff” still just sounds like line items on their PO’s or worse yet, the description straight out of their retail POS systems.

Any persuasive seller knows you have to speak in your targets language and you actually need to tell them why should I care…what does this do for me?

Here’s a great example of a big retailer describing a T-Shirt of all things:
Banana Republic

Here’s Nordstom’s falling a little short:
Dress


It’s funny, when content space is for free (unlike catalogs where each sku competes against the next)…it really exposes the lack of originality and saleswomanship behind companies.

I’d ask companies like Banana Republic to go a step further and start incorporating language that goes beyond the “materials” and event for the item…and looks to the reasons why and speaking in the voices of customers. Obviously user reviews play big here.

Good starting read:

Online Copy Writing Book