A high-end sports club called Lifetime Fitness recently opened in La Jolla (CA) where I live. Think high-end resort amenities located on Main Street. With an abundance of classes, machines, healthy and tasty restaurant offerings, experienced trainers, and to-die-for steam bath and sauna, this “top brand” is stealing members from other clubs and from specialty niches gyms, like the Barre, Yoga, and Pilates studios. At $200/month, Lifetime membership is expensive. But if you work out a lot and enjoy a range of activities and an occasional steam bath, it’s a deal. The low-end clubs in La Jolla, like 24-hour Fitness, will do just fine. It’s the former high-end clubs that will find themselves challenged. Not surprisingly, some here in town are now offering membership deals, hoping to beat Lifetime’s price point. The niche spin-cycle clubs and yoga studios will also have a less-safe…
5 ways to keep your brand relevant
Your business can do many vital things well. High customer satisfaction ratings. High quality at a competitive price point. Great customer experience. But if you become irrelevant to the tastes, interests, and requirements of customers, all that “right stuff” won’t matter. Therefore you must understand where markets are headed, not just what’s relevant today. Let’s think about some current trends and imagine their impact by flashing forward 30 years when the last year of the baby boomer cohort (those born in 1964) turns 96. Will gas-powered cars be relevant? Family farms (sadly)? Long-haul truck drivers? Landline phones? Printed newspapers? Going to a doctor’s office for a simple exam? Single-use plastics outside medical markets? Leaders managing brands do the work of future forecasting because they want to evolve their offering to remain relevant. When leaders fail to do so, their brand (and often company)…
Disruption is great, but make sure you answer five key questions correctly before investing.
2019 is the first year in a long time when IPOs are generating lower returns than existing stocks. Has the era of disruption come to an end? Not for a minute, if you ask me. Finding ways to disrupt a market to deliver more value to a group of customers will always be at the heart of strategic, market, and economic success. The renowned economist Schumpeter taught us this fact decades ago. The generation of wealth since WWII in free markets versus planned markets was proof of his thesis. So, of course, the market loves disruption and awards start-ups, some with “Unicorn” (i.e., > one billion dollars) valuations. But some disruptions are duds. WeWork, the shared office space company, is one example. WeWork recently withdrew its IPO as potential investors raised questions about its underlying financials. Others are not all they are hyped…
When your Cadillac is no longer a cadillac brand: 5 lessons for fixing a failing brand
Cadillac was once so strong as a brand that it became an adjective for best-in-class. Today it has a brand problem. Too many of its drivers are old and will soon age out of the car-buying market. Over recent decades, German brands have trumped Cadillac on prestige in the traditional engine market, and Tesla is winning the electric market. (Audi is fast following into electric cars.) Cadillac tried a reboot in the past, through advertising and moving the headquarters to Soho, NYC. However, that did little in an age of transparency when actions define a brand, not spin. The top-of-the-line GM brand began a more genuine reboot in 2018 when it moved headquarters back to its roots, Detroit, and appointed a veteran engineer as president of the brand. The brand is building for the long term, according to a recent NYT article, but let…
Define your niche to create a winning business model
Competition is a drag on earnings. Darn, but welcome to life. The key to success comes from reducing or eliminating competition legally. Some companies eliminate competition by being the very lowest cost to meet requirements to be considered by a customer group. High-end bed linen and mattresses are pursuing this strategy with a direct-to-consumer business model, displacing high-end brands sold through retail stores. An approach beyond competing on price is to offer something no one else can do as well. You may be more expensive, but you are worth it. Think of a plastic surgeon with the best reputation in a city. Build loyalty with the customer base you target and then get them to buy more things from you. Independent bookstores have taken this approach in light of Amazon, with Barnes and Noble stuck in an unattractive middle, especially as Amazon opens…
Where Facebook took the wrong turn
Every organization has what I call a strategic customer. It’s the target market that, if lost, creates peril for the business. For an advertising agency, it’s the businesses that consider the agency their agency-of-record, as these customers cover fixed costs. Many companies, like Amazon, have dual-sided business models: it has two customer groups, buyers of products from its platform and suppliers of those products. Is one more strategic? At Amazon’s start, providers of products and services ranked higher. Why? If publishers and authors had refused to sell their books through Amazon, we’d still enjoy visiting Borders stores. Over time, as Amazon became a required channel for most manufacturers, the company wisely changed its strategic customer to the consumer. Local stores, Prime, same-day delivery, Alexa, and other solutions to better serve us are proof points of the strategic shift. Facebook, like Amazon, has a…
Lessons from a retail chain winner and loser
It was the best of times for Best Buy and the worst of times for Toys “R” Us in the news this week. Years ago, analysts expected Best Buy to go the way of Borders, a bookseller disrupted by Amazon’s online magic. Instead, Best Buy has held up well against Amazon. It not only avoided the fate of electronics chains that did go bankrupt (e.g., Radio Shack and Circuit City) it’s a stock we all should have purchased. Toys “R” Us, on the other hand, announced its bankruptcy this week. Economists love natural experiments, and the Best Buy versus Toys “R” Us comparison offers one for retail markets. Why did Best Buy succeed where Toys “R” Us failed? What lessons can we glean? The key takeaway: You cannot beat Amazon at its own retail game. You must win at a different game. Toys…
Forgotten wallets, Brennan’s, and Disruption in the Food Business
A trip to my local grocery store is an almost-daily ritual, as I hate to plan dinner ahead of time. The store is also a lovely 15-minute walk from my La Jolla home, making last minute dinner decisions doable without driving. The checkout staff contains familiar faces. When I recently forgot to bring my wallet to the store, I asked Bob if he would let me sign an IOU. He’s the round-faced 35-ish-year-old clerk who always looks like he is thinking of songs rather than codes as he rings up my produce prices. “After all, I’ll be here tomorrow … just like I was here yesterday.” “No way! It’s not our policy,” Bob replied, with a tone implying I was trying to pull a fast one over him. Did his response make sense in an era when Amazon acquired Whole Foods, and two-hour…
How to Expand Without Exploding
“Brands Expand Into New Niches With Care, but Not Without Risk,” a recent NYT article, was full compelling brand extension stories. It also contained examples in which I found myself saying, “What were they thinking?” Here are some examples from the article of both ends of the spectrum. The tagline of British luxury sports car brand Aston Martin (if you have to ask the price, you cannot afford it) is “The Art of Living.” Its recent extension into exclusive Miami Beach condos makes sense, following the tracks of its luxury speedboats, menswear, and jewelry. Aston Martin is selling exclusivity. Appreciate its designers, and you will enjoy Aston Martin’s world. Harley Davidson did the same thing, extending into clothing, home furnishings, and experiences, albeit for a different target market. But as to lighter fluid manufacturer Zippo moving into women’s fragrances, what were they thinking?…
The Healthcare Sector Braces for More Transformation: Is your business model ready?
The Xconomy San Diego Forum on the Human Impact of Innovation offered a window into how information technology and science, marching hand-in-hand, will shape healthcare. “IBM’s Watson is not the only breakthrough game in healthcare,” was the best summary of the afternoon. Today’s unpredictable markets demand that as you maximize performance from your current business model, you must in parallel be designing and developing new business models to disrupt the current cash generators. Otherwise, start-ups will turn your company into a dinosaur. In doing this leadership work, consider four key trends highlighted in the conference. Each one alone portends major changes for a number of players in the industry and the combined effect of which will surely reinvent the entire sector. 1) Advances in “micro” medicine Healthcare technology is increasingly leading to a better understanding of what’s happening at a genetic level. For…