Winner Stability

There are pros and cons to what I call "winner stability". This metric captures the rate that last year's winning items maintain winning status this year.

The "right" rate is different for everybody. If you sell the same products year-after-year, a drop in winner stability from 93% to 79% is a catastrophe. Fashion brands wouldn't even bother to measure the concept.

When winner stability declines and new item introductions suffer, your business will suffer.

Therefore, measure "winner stability" carefully ... once a month should be sufficient. Look for changes in the metric, and do some digging if you see rates drop suddenly.

No Context

Read this article and you'll be struck with a notable finding (click here).

• There is no context here. "Pureplay decreased by 51%". "Share of Ear?"

The article would have lead you to believe that people are listening to Spotify half as much as in the past. Actual company data from Spotify shows revenue growth that is essentially unfettered.

In order for survey data to be accurate, a few things "could" have happened.

1. The audience would have to grow about 4x as fast to compensate for a 51% reduction in "share of ear" whatever that metric means.
2. The data Spotify shares publicly (above) is misleading.

This link suggests that Spotify share of market is down about 3% over the past five years (click here).

When an industry struggles to keep their incumbent status, all sorts of interesting survey results are released. I spoke at a conference five years ago sharing data I'd observe across a trillion dollars in purchase transactions. The next speaker addressed the audience and informed the audience that he was about to reveal "the truth" because of a survey of 300 households. His version of "the truth"? Print was making a comeback.

Anytime your industry trade journalists publish articles loaded with percentages based on obscure metrics like "share of ear", run, don't walk from the "research".

I recall reading an article in a trade journal suggesting that "more and more brands are seeing the value of print". What does that mean? Use of print as a marketing tool is down about 80% since 2008, +/-. How could "more and more" possibly be true?

P.S.: This summarization of radio metrics could well be correct - and while optimistic, it isn't anywhere close to the survey results mentioned above (click here).

I Promise This Will Eventually Be A Business Post ... But First ...

On Monday night, a furious finish to the 76ers/Knicks game was captured by three announcing teams.

On TBS, legendary Milwaukee Brewers announcer Brian Anderson shows you what a professional, unbiased approach sounds like (click here and watch through the 5:26 mark).

Ok, here's the best NBA announcer ... Mike Breen ... calling the game on MSG for Knicks fans ... notice a difference in tone (click here)?

Yes, I saved the best for last. This is the camera that is set up to monitor the Knicks radio team. They have to paint a picture for their audience. Listen to the crowd noise, the tension created by old-school organ music, blood-curdling screams from the Knicks faithful, the detail from the play-by-play announcer ... and watch the color commentator go from depression to hope to delirium to having to calmly analyze the situation (click here) ... she just snaps into "professional mode". How blessed are Knicks fans to have her to listen to? Wow.

What does this have to do with your business?

Do you remember the J. Peterman character on Seinfeld? This was the "peak catalog" era of the mid-90s, when catalogs ... yes, catalogs ... were part of the plot of a TV show watched by 35,000,000 people each week.

Extra credit if you can tell me what line he's saying there ... hint, it is about J. Peterman employee "Zach".

Well, the character was an obvious parody of the actual founder of the J. Peterman catalog ... which went from zero to sixty in 3.9 seconds before fully imploding due to inventory management issues. However, the text associated with the creative aligned a lot more with the commentary of the Knicks radio announcers than the admittedly good national call by Brian Anderson on TBS.

Now it's about you.

Take a look at this Venture No-Pull Harness from In The Company of Dogs. Better yet, read the copy associated with the item.

As J. Peterman once said in an episode of Seinfeld ... "well, that's a lot of words".

Why in the name of Gary Comer does everything in the Omnichannel Thesis have to be so ... darn ... boring? 

Why?

I mean, you page down from that yawner and immediately you have a customer named "Halter" who talks about her three-legged chihuahua / terrier mix ... immediately the customer is doing a better job than the copywriter.

You have somebody in your company who has passion for what you sell ... somebody similar to the radio color commentator for the Knicks. Why not give that person some latitude to sell with a bit of passion?

Test it ... what do you have to lose?

Culture

Rate your company culture on a scale from 0-10. If your rating is below 8, what needs to happen to get it up to an eight? Discuss.

P.S.: Leadership ... in Sports and in Business ... is completely underrated, and is mostly missing.

Your Low-Cost Items

In most of my projects in the past nine months, the importance of having "something" at a low price repeats ... a recurring theme if you will. A low-cost item that customers love generates new customers, causes existing customers to move up the loyalty chain, and gives best customers something to purchase on auto-pilot.

You already know I'm well down the headphone rabbit hole. After settling on over-ear open-back headphones, I've dabbled in corded iems (in-ear monitors). My starting point? A $24.99 pair of 7Hz x Crinacle Zero:2 iems. They were the gateway drug that led me to a better pair of iems (click here). The low-priced item was of such spectacular (sound) quality that I spent more.

You have a low-cost item like the iems I mentioned above. Promote that thing from the rooftops. Make sure every customer and prospect knows WHY they MUST purchase that item.

Do the opposite of the "Macy's Strategy" of constantly playing games with prices. Offer something at a spectacular value and use that item as a key tactic in your marketing plan.

Make sense?

Well, You Got Me Fired

I'd run what I now call a "Merchandise Dynamics" project for a brand. This brand was struggling, badly. When I looked at the data, it was obvious that the Merchandise Executive made two classic merchandising mistakes.

1. The Executive discontinued items that customers enjoyed.
2. The Executive failed to find new items that were compelling ... both under-utilizing new item and sourcing new items that performed worse than new items performed historically.

It's common for a brand to survive new item missteps.

It's uncommon for a brand to thrive when discontinuing items that customers enjoyed.

I presented my findings ... I got blowback from the merchandising team as I expected to, and then I went home.

A few months later, my phone rings. It's the Merchandising Executive from the brand I just studied. Here's how the call started.

• "Well, you got me fired. Now you're going to help me get a new job."

I didn't get the guy fired. Discontinuing items that customers enjoyed while not replacing them with items that customers equally enjoy gets EVERY merchandising leader fired.

I'm seeing problems in 2024. I could have cared less about new merchandise problems in 2021/2022 when merchandise was sitting on a ship in Long Beach for a month. I care a lot about what I'm seeing now that most of the challenges have been resolved. There are decisions to kill items that shouldn't be made. There are new items that have no chance of success.

There's a reason I am revising Merchandise Dynamics in 2024 ... and there is a reason you are hiring me to perform the work. Something is broken when it comes to the merchandise you sell.

What Would You Do If You Owned A Gas Station?

The number of gas stations has been in decline for four decades, maybe longer.

Those that stayed in business did stuff like Casey's General Store did ... convenience grocery, pizza, fried chicken, you get the picture.

So yeah, those that stayed in business decided to siphon off some of the Twinkies and Fritos and Large Pepsi drinks sold by other folks.

Of course, if you run a gas station, there is a cliff that your business model is eventually going to plunge into.

• Electric Vehicles.

What do you do when the customer charges his/her car at home instead of purchasing gas at a Casey's?

I get it, this transition isn't happening overnight.

And I get it, if your gas station is at the interchange of I-10 and I-8, you'll likely stay in business no matter what happens to cars ... you have too many cars whizzing by.

How about the gas station two blocks off of the Interstate Highway, a gas station that is nearly identical to the gas station two blocks off of the Interstate Highway one mile in either direction? This is the gas station that derives business from the individual running chores locally, needing gas a few times a month. Now this customer charges at home. And if a customer does charge at your gas station ... assuming you make the million dollar or more investment to put in charging stations that charge a car in 20-30 minutes, does the customer want to stare at $7 half-gallons of chocolate milk for a half-hour? No! Which means you need to remodel your store to potentially look more like the lounge at the local Toyota dealership where customers wait for their brake fluid to be drained and replaced (#highgrossmargins). That will also cost money, with no guarantee of a return on investment.

What do you do?

Almost every decision you are required to make is expensive ... and there is zero guarantee that your decisions will work. In other words ... you can't just sit there and do nothing, but doing something is awful.

This translates to your business. Amazon is mulching e-commerce brands, with paper/printing/postage vendors well on their way to causing an outcome where one cataloger mails a billion pieces per year that cost $27.00 each to produce.

What do you do?

You can't just sit there and do nothing.

Think carefully about gas stations, and how gas stations relate to your challenges, ok?