Business

Blockbuster lives! (But for how long?)

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Blockbuster logoI blogged recently about the financial travails of Blockbuster and its pending sale … indeed, whether the brand would survive or be liquidated instead.

Wednesday evening’s auction was the scene of some drama as various groups contended with each other for the right to purchase this white elephant. As the evening wore on, Dish Network was vying with Monarch Alternative Capital for placing the high bid.

It was a true battle between old and new forces … with Dish Network seeing Blockbuster as a conduit for augmenting its suite of services, and Monarch looking only to liquidate Blockbuster’s substantial real estate holdings while shuttering the enterprise for good.

When the dust finally settled, Dish Network was the victor, agreeing to pay ~$228 million in cash at closing, which is expected to occur within the next few months. In total, the deal came in at ~$320 million, which tracks with the current value of Blockbuster’s assets.

What in tarnation is Dish Network thinking of doing with Blockbuster? It turns out that the company is hoping to use at least some of Blockbuster’s ~1,700 store outlets to facilitate cross-marketing of its satellite programming and related video services.

The industry is already abuzz with what this really means. Is the Blockbuster acquisition by Dish Network a master-stroke … or a big blunder?

Dish Network looks like it will attempt to keep Blockbuster afloat by having it provide free or discounted rentals as a value-add to Dish’s pay TV subscribers. But industry watchers are also looking at potential online opportunities which could turn out to be more lucrative, since Blockbuster holds streaming rights to various video titles that Dish can use to expand its existing streaming offerings. It could also roll Blockbuster licenses into a Dish-branded online video-on-demand service offering.

In a likely related move, Dish Network has also acquired the assets of financially troubled satellite operator DBSD North America. That purchase provided access to a broadband spectrum that Dish can now use to roll out wireless networks for voice or data communications. This way, it wouldn’t need to rely on the broadband networks of other Internet service providers to stream the content to its satellite TV customers.

But with the pace of change and the fickleness of customers, any effort to bring synergy to these new acquisitions must happen very quickly. Dish Network doesn’t have the luxury of time to make things work; it’s got to happen in weeks and months rather than years.

So the coming months will be interesting in seeing how the Dish/Blockbuster union pans out. One thing is certain: Blockbuster won’t end up looking anything like it does today. But on the bright side, the brand won’t be thrown into the dustbin of corporate history – at least not yet.

And that probably surprises more than a few industry observers – the ones who have been loudly predicting the death of this iconic brand for months or years now.

E-mail early birds? The worm may be turning differently.

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Best time to deploy marketing e-mail messages.One of the great benefits of the “online everything” world in which we now live is the ability to evaluate nearly anything about marketing not with hunches or speculation, but with hard data.

A perennial question is what time of day is best to deploy marketing e-mails to customers and prospects. The higher the propensity to open and read these messages, you’re closer to the goal of converting eyeballs to clickthroughs … and to sales.

ReachMail, a Chicago-based e-mail service provider, recently studied a large sampling (~650,000) of the millions of consumer and business marketing e-mail messages it sends out for clients daily in order to determine open rate differences based on the time of day. It normalized the data to account for different time zones.

What ReachMail found was that there are differing peak open rate times on weekends versus on weekdays:

 Weekdays: Peak e-mail open rates are between ~11:30 am and ~2:00 pm.

 Weekends: E-mail open rates begin trending upward at ~11:30 am, but don’t peak until ~4:00 pm.

John Murphy, ReachMail’s president, had this to say about people’s weekday e-mail open rate behaviors: “You would think it would spike in the morning, but they’re looking at work e-mails in the morning. Once they’ve cleared out their inbox, they’re looking at marketing e-mails in the afternoon.”

ReachMail’s conclusion: It’s best to deploy weekday e-mails between 10:00 am and Noon. For weekend e-mails, deploy them between Noon and 3:00 pm.

And this additional tidbit also: Don’t assume e-mails sent during the week will perform better than those deployed over the weekend. “People’s engagement rates are up there on the weekend,” Murphy maintains. “It’s our habit of checking e-mail all the time.”

He’s sure right about that.

Third-Party e-Mail Lists: Clicks to Nowhere?

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Clickthrough fraudOf the various issues that are on every marketing manager’s plate, concern about the quality of third-party e-mail lists is surely one of them. It’s a common view that the effectiveness of a purchased e-mail data file is worse than a carefully crafted in-house list based on input from the sales team plus opt-in requests from customers.

Part of the reason is that there’s less likelihood for recipients to be interested in the products and services of the company, which only makes intuitive sense. But there may be other, more nefarious reasons at work as well.

Ever heard of a click-o-meter? It’s the way some e-mail lists are made to look more effective than they actually are. In its basic form, this is nothing more than people paid to open e-mails with no other interest or intention of further engagement. The more technical way is to have an automated click setting, usually done through a rotation of IP addresses.

To the casual observer, this gives the impression of recipients who are interested in a company’s offer, but the final analysis will show something quite different: near-zero purchases or other relevant actions. The problem is that for many campaigns, ROI will be slow at first, so the grim reality that the company has been punked comes later.

The growth of the autobot click-o-meter phenomenon tracks with the growing interest in purchasing third-party lists based on cost-per-click (CPC) performance rather than on the traditional cost-per-thousand (CPM) basis. Not surprisingly, when list vendors started being asked to sell lists based on a CPC versus CPM basis, for some of them the temptation to “juice the numbers” was too great. And since many of the databases come from other sources and are private-labeled, the problem is perpetrated throughout the system.

Many purchasers have wised up to this issue by settling on one or two list brokers that they know and trust, by asking about the data source, and by asking for client references for the lists in question. If an e-mail database has suddenly changed in pricing from a CPM to a CPC basis, that may be another cause for concern.

Another option is to hire a third-party traffic monitoring service to assist with back-end analyses of e-mail campaigns to see what’s working or not working in specific campaigns and nip any problems in the bud before they do too much damage to a marketing effort.

But like anything else, self-education is critical. Most companies who are victims of fraudulent e-mail practices become so because their staff members are unaware of the potential problems. But the information is out there for the asking, and that knowledge will soon become “intuition” – usually the best predictor of ROI!

What Social Media is Teaching Us (Again)

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Social MediaSocial media – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, blogs and all that – burst onto the scene only a few years ago. Because of this, we’re still learning daily how these tools are impacting and influencing attitudes about companies and brands … as well as the propensity for people to buy products and services as a result.

But some aspects are coming into pretty strong focus now. One of the interesting insights I’ve drawn from social media is that it spotlights the “disconnect” that exists between marketing and sales personnel.

This disconnect has existed for decades, of course. In my nearly 35 years in business, I’ve heard a common refrain from sales folks. It goes something like this: “I have no idea what those people in marketing do all day long!”

On the flip side, the marketing pros have a few choice words for the sales personnel as well: “All they ever think about is the next order. Unless it delivers instant hot prospects who are ready to buy immediately, they’re not interested in any of our marketing programs.”

This is why so many B-to-B companies have tried to cross-pollinate between marketing and sales by moving staff back and forth between the two areas.

But what company is inclined to gives up its star sales performers to marketing? What happens more often is that the underperforming sales people are the ones who end up in marketing … where they then achieve only middling success there as well.

Conversely, so many of the best sales performers aren’t “God’s gift to strategic thinking” at all … while the marketing people who are so creative and insightful when thinking about markets are woefully inadequate when it comes to keeping up with a Rolodex® full of dozens of sales contacts.

Another part of the problem is the approach to metrics. Marketing personnel have historically been focused on reaching wider audiences. To a salesperson, things like “creating awareness” and “building a brand” are frustratingly fuzzy. Instead, salespeople focus on individual customers, sales quotas and other quantifiable information – real “bottom line” figures.

Today, social media is bringing all of this into sharper relief. To be most effective, social media demand that marketing and sales personnel work together. It’s no longer possible for the two groups to employ different approaches, different interactions and different metrics for success.

To my view, it’s going to be harder for marketing and communications personnel to get their heads around new expectations for metrics and analyses when compared to the sales folks. There are many new analytical tools to be mastered – and that’s probably a source of fear for many a marketer.

For salespeople, who live and die by facts and figures, this is duck soup by comparison.

And if you really think about social media, it’s about audience (customer) engagement in a direct and personal manner. Who’s been doing that for years? The sales force, of course.

So does it make any sense to “silo” social media activity and content development within the marketing department? Generally speaking, no.

In fact, many sales personnel have already embraced social media activities because they see it as another useful tool to leverage customer engagement. This is an environment they already know well, because they’ve always been in the business of building relationships.

So the times demand that marketing and sales team up as never before. For marketers, that means opening up the social media initiative and structuring it to include sales personnel as well the marketing staff. Redlining these tasks won’t work.

And here’s another idea: Have the marketing staff hang around with the sales force. Put them out there at trade shows and other industry events where they are forced interact with customers and behave like … salespeople!

[This is especially true if a company’s marketing staff comes from collegiate or administrative backgrounds – a common weakness in many mid-sized B-to-B firms where the most lucrative upward career paths take employees through engineering, R&D or sales, not through marketing and communications.]

Social media reminds us, once again, that the key to success in business is “mixing it up” with customers and prospects. We need to make sure we do the same inside our own companies.

Facebook’s Hidden Bombshells

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Facebook's hidden bombshellsAs Facebook has been busily turning itself into a web powerhouse – challenging even the likes of Google for dominance – some people are beginning to question the fundamental aspects of how Facebook treats users and the content they post.

Last week I came across an interesting article by Douglas Karr, a social media consultant and author, who has spent thousands of dollars advertising on Facebook for himself and his clients. Karr summarized recent experiences he’s had with Facebook accounts that now make him extremely leery of using it as a central rather than an ancillary platform for promoting companies and their brands.

Facebook somehow became suspicious of entries posted by one of Karr’s clients. Facebook then proceeded to disable every administrator’s account that was associated with this client’s Facebook page. Because Karr was one of the administrators, this action disabled all of his Facebook pages and applications as well.

It then took a Herculean effort to repair the damage, during which time Karr learned quite a bit more about the customer service side of Facebook – if you could even call it “customer service.” Here’s how he summarizes it:

Facebook lacks a meaningful customer service process. There’s no phone number to call … or dedicated e-mail address specifically for support. So good luck trying to get any sort of satisfaction. Karr was asked to submit a form in order for his account to be turned back on. But that communication only resulted in an automated reply message to verify his identity.

In the meantime, with his accounts disabled, there was no way for Karr to log in and retrieve any of the now-hidden content.

What Karr learned is when all of what makes a Facebook presence so valuable – postings, photos, video and other content, fans, applications, etc. – goes by the boards, there’s essentially no recourse for a business.

Luckily for Karr, his account was re-enabled after a few days – with no notification from Facebook. But then he still had to republish all of the pages.

[It turns out that Karr’s client had a “friend of a friend of a friend” at Facebook who was able to pull a few strings to set things right … but how many of us should be so fortunate?]

This experience revealed another distasteful reality: The content you post on Facebook may be yours, but Facebook owns the access to it.

Yep. If you look closely at Facebook’s fine print, this is what you’ll find: “You grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook.”

So much for keeping proprietary control over anything that may go viral and ends up on Facebook.

Karr’s word of advice for companies considering employing Facebook as their primary means of generating online traffic and revenue: “Don’t.”

Instead, he suggests adopting other tactics such as developing a blog, investing in search engine optimization and search engine marketing, using Twitter … and owning all of your content on your own domain.

That’s pretty smart advice from someone who speaks from experience.

3D Printing: Will it “change everything” in manufacturing?

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Objects and components made using 3D printingThe Economist magazine published an article earlier this month about an increasingly popular technology that may irretrievably alter the world of manufacturing. Known as “three-dimensional printing” or “additive manufacturing technology,” it’s expected to dramatically impact manufacturing industries.

The technology makes it possible to “print” three-dimensional objects, components or assemblies from a digital file, utilizing several different materials with differing mechanical and physical properties in a single-build process.

The way this is done is by building up the object gradually by depositing material from a nozzle, or by solidifying thin layers of plastic or metal particles using glue droplets or focused beam technology.

[If you’re having some difficulty wrapping your head around the concept, this short tutorial/demonstration using a Z Corporation 3D printer will serve as a good introduction.]

At present, the 3D process is possible using certain materials such as plastics, resins and metals, a precisions of ~0.1 millimeter. And while it’s been primarily the preserve of academicians and laboratories up until now, experts believe the technology is now poised for commercial success as 3D printing capabilities continue to improve and costs decline.

In fact, significant growth has already been observed over the past seven or eight years — and now a “race to the bottom” with pricing is beginning to pick up steam. To wit: A basic 3D printer-fabricator costs less today than a laser printer did in 1985.

With the manner in which this technology is developing, there’s really no end to the possible products that can be made. Small components, automotive parts and a host of other products will all be fair game in the coming years.

3D printing technology is even being studied by biotechnology companies for use in computer-aided tissue engineering applications wherein organs and body parts are created using 3D inkjet techniques. Living cells are deposited onto a gel and slowly built up to form 3D structures.

And what also makes all of this potentially revolutionary is that harnessing the technology does not have to happen only in a conventional “factory.”

Think about it. Small parts can be made by a machine that’s the size of a desktop printer. With such equipment available, no longer will manufacturers need to rely on OEM suppliers here or offshore to supply parts and accessories. And they can make as many or as few as they need, so the old notion of a large production line starts looking increasingly irrelevant.

There are additional benefits of this technology that industry watchers note. Product prototyping is expected to become easier, faster and cheaper than ever. Companies can “test and tweak” components with their best customers, making adjustments to the design until things are perfected – all in a finely controlled environment where there’s no such thing as wasted inventory or “wish and wait for” parts coming from outside or offshore.

Waste and scrap materials are slated to be far less, too, as 3D technology uses only just the amount of material needed to construct each part.

Thinking beyond the production-centric aspects, other implications for manufacturing businesses are big. Reducing barriers to entry for manufacturing, 3D printing may well promote more innovation than ever before. The ability to produce items without needing the full force of a factory behind them will be a huge benefit to inventors, entrepreneurs and start-up operations, because product development, beta testing and first-run production will cost less and present lower risks.

Will the flexibility to design and produce components that the 3D technology allows mean that there’ll be less need to look to offshore suppliers for cheaply manufactured products? We can’t know for sure, but the prospects that a shift in manufacturing activity from the Far East back home is certainly tantalizing.

As with any new innovation, there are potential downsides and possible “unintended consequences.” For one, intellectual property may become much harder to protect … after all, when an object can be described in a digital file, it becomes much easier to copy and distribute.

But one thing is definite: 3D printing is a topic that’ll be front-and-center in the coming years as we sort through the opportunities and the implications.

End-Game for Borders and Blockbuster?

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Blockbuster logoBorders logoTwo items reported this past week are yet more bad news for one of the most beleaguered sectors of the retail industry. Borders Books & Music will be filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and Blockbuster is preparing itself for sale.

Does this mean we’ve now reached the end-game for these iconic brands – and for the entire retail book/movie store segment?

Actually, we’ve seen this play out before. Less than 15 years ago, Tower Records and Sam Goody were two vibrant national chain store operations selling CDs and other recorded music. But these and most other music merchants are now history.

In fact, the only bricks-and-mortar music retail segment remaining is made up of used record and CD stores – typically one or two shoestring operations operating in major urban markets that manage to eke out a hand-to-mouth existence.

It appears that the same thing may now be happening to books. Consider Borders. It’s tried all sorts of ways to branch into other revenue-producing endeavors to make up for the consumers’ shift to buying books online or downloading to e-readers. Those endeavors have included coffee and juice bars, greeting card kiosks, giving customers the ability to download books and music, and even to explore genealogy and family history. Despite all that, Borders has been unable to stem the decline of its business.

Mike Shatzkin of consulting firm Idea Logical Company contends that the problem is bigger than Borders. He believes bookstores are going the way of music stores. “I think that there will be a 50% reduction in bricks-and-mortar shelf space for books within five years, and 90% within ten years,” he predicts.

The immediate question is whether Borders will be able to restructure its business, or in the end will be forced to liquidate. Borders’ debt is so high (it’s expected to report nearly $1 billion in liabilities when it files), the company is already committing to closing about a third of its ~675 Borders and Waldenbooks store outlets.

It’s possible that book superstore rival Barnes & Noble will see at least a short-term gain from Borders’ travails. It’s a larger entity and is doing better financially. Gary Balter, an analyst with Credit Suisse, believes Barnes & Noble could add as much as $1 billion in sales if Borders ultimately goes out of business.

But that kind of benefit may well turn out to be temporary. After all, Tower Records benefited from the closure of Sam Goody – for a time. But ultimately, Amazon and online sales were the big winners, and there’s every indication that they will be the main beneficiaries now as well.

In the movie rental business, things aren’t any better. I’ve blogged before about the challenges faced by Blockbuster, the nation’s leading movie-rental chain that went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy in September 2010. The company is now preparing itself for sale, but there are ominous signs that the initiative may be stillborn.

Some bondholders, led by investor Carl Icahn, are concerned that the company’s value is eroding in bankruptcy court, which has made it more difficult to take the steps necessary to compete with Netflix and other rivals that aren’t hobbled by the cost of running retail storefront operations.

According to business news reports, that is what’s behind the drive to try to sell the company now. Blockbuster’s holiday sales were lackluster at best, and the cost estimates for effecting a successful turnaround are going ever higher. The bondholders have essentially lost their appetite for plowing more money into the enterprise.

So who’s actually going to be interested in buying Blockbuster? That’s a very interesting question, because the company’s business model and financial situation don’t look like strong ingredients for business success. So if a buyer emerges, it may be from among the ranks of those who already have a financial stake in the business – like Mr. Icahn.

Will we look back on this week a few years from now and say that it was the beginning of a turnaround – or the final nails in the coffin? If you’re a betting person – or an investor – where would you place your money?

Valentine’s Day Spending: All Hearts and Flowers?

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Valentine's Day is hearts and dollarsWith the recession finally receding, are we now seeing an uptick in spending for Valentine’s Day — arguably the most romantic day on the calendar?

According to a January Consumer Intentions & Actions questionnaire conducted among ~8,900 participants for the National Retail Federation by survey firm BIGresearch, American adults over age 18 will spend an average of ~$115 on traditional Valentine’s Day merchandise this year. That’s up more than 11% over 2010, and collectively represents spending of nearly $17 billion.

But we have yet to return to the levels of Valentine’s Day spending that were reached in 2007 and 2008 – the highest on record.

Jewelry appears to be the big item on the Valentine’s Day shopping list. Approximately $3.5 billion is expected to be spent in this segment this year, which is up more than 15% from the ~$3.0 billion spent in 2010.

Dining out is another popular category, but its growth is not expected to be nearly as big as jewelry’s – just 3%. The six most popular categories as determined in the NRF study include:

 Jewelry: $3.5 billion
 Dining out: $3.3 billion
 Flowers: $1.7 billion
 Clothing: $1.6 billion
 Candy: $1.5 billion
 Greeting cards: $1.1 billion

[I was surprised at the greeting cards figure. True, cards are a lower-price item compared to the other categories, but the number still seemed pretty meager. It turns out that only about half of the consumers surveyed reported that they planned on purchasing a Valentine’s card, which was lower than I thought would be the case.]

Not surprisingly, younger adults (age 25-34) are expected to spend significantly more than their older counterparts. They’re projected to spend an average of nearly $190 on Valentine’s Day merchandise compared to only about $60 spent by adults over 65.

But it’s not just because of “sweet, fresh young love” versus “tired, worn-out old love.” It’s because young couples and young parents are often buying not only for each other, but also for their co-workers … their children … their children’s friends … and their children’s teachers as well.

And here’s another statistic that won’t surprise very many people: Women will receive Valentine’s Day gifts averaging around $160, which is double the value of gifts for men.

Now, that’s a dynamic that’s likely never changed … and probably never will!

Taking the Buzz-Saw to Corporate Buzzwords

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No buzzwordsBuzzwords – those stock words or phrases that have effectively become nonsense through their endless repetition – tend to find their penultimate manifestation in forgettable corporate vision and mission statements.

If you look online, you’ll find that the “about us” pages on corporate web sites are littered with the detritus of high-mannered phrases. We all know them — terms like:

 Best-in-class
 Best practices
 Commitment
 Customer-focused
 Cutting-edge
 Delighting customers
 Exceeding expectations
 Expertise
 Green
 Innovation
 Integrity
 Out-of-the-box thinking
 Proactive
 Quality
 Solutions
 Sustainability
 Synergy
 Trust
 Worldclass

Considering how frequently these terms show up in company positioning statements, is it any wonder they’ve become nothing but meaningless pablum?

Here’s an interesting exercise: Try to find a published corporate vision, mission or positioning statement that doesn’t contain any of the terms above. I spent the better part of an hour looking, only to come up empty handed.

This is not to denigrate the aims of businesses. We all want our companies to embody the laudable qualities these terms describe. And why not? They’re good principles that are worthy goals in how to interact with customers, with communities, and with the larger world.

But companies also want differentiation, not sameness.

Unfortunately, you’ll find none of that with these terms here. Just mealy-mouthed nothings and “yesterday’s vision for tomorrow” … conveyed with all the pizzazz of a cold mashed potato sandwich.

So it’s back to the drawing board, or it should be. But considering the birth pangs most of these mission / vision statements must have endured in the first place — committee assignments and all — that’s probably not going to happen.

Remembering Financier and Arts Patron Roy Neuberger (1903-2010)

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Roy Neuberger
Roy Neuberger: Financier and art patron extraordinaire.
When someone lives to the age of 107, that’s news in and of itself.

But when Roy R. Neuberger died at 107 on Christmas Eve Day, he was far more than just a person who had lived an extraordinarily long life. He was one of the most significant figures in 20th Century American finance, along with being an important patron of the arts.

Neuberger’s life story follows the arc of America’s modern history. Born into a family of wealth in Bridgeport, CT in 1903, he was orphaned at an early age. At first Neuberger was interested in a journalism career, but found college studies unfulfilling and dropped out of New York University before earning his degree.

Neuberger’s first job in business was with B. Altmans, a famous New York department store. He would later recall that this experience prepared him not just for a life in business, but also nurtured a lifelong appreciation for art.

Neuberger then took a sabbatical from business in his early 20s to travel to Europe, where he dabbled in painting and lived the life of a Bohemian in Paris along with other American expatriates.

After this wanderlust wore off and he was back in the United States, Neuberger stepped back into the business world by beginning his career on Wall Street – mere months before the stock market crash of 1929. Soldiering on during the years of the Depression, by 1939 he had co-founded Neuberger Berman, an investment firm that would later establish one of the first no-load mutual funds in America (the Guardian Fund – still in operation today).

But Neuberger’s love of art and painting was never far from his mind. In fact, by the early 1940s he was well on his way to becoming one of America’s most important art patrons. Neuberger was an early admirer of the paintings of Peter Hurd, promoting his works and helping to put this artist on the cultural map. It was a pattern that would be repeated over the years, as Neuberger championed the works of such luminaries as Edward Hopper, Milton Avery, Alexander Calder and Jackson Pollock.

Over the decades, not only did Neuberger amass a trove of modern art, he was to become a major benefactor of important works to institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), as well as numerous college and university museums. This culminated in the building of the Neuberger Museum of Art on the campus of the State University of New York in Purchase, to house his collection. The museum, designed by architect Philip Johnson, opened in 1974.

On the social scene, Roy Neuberger was a fixture in New York business, political and artistic circles. He was a close personal friend of Gov. and later Vice President Nelson Rockefeller. In later years, after the death of his wife, he was a regular escort of the glamorous singer, actress and fellow art patron Kitty Carlisle Hart – another member of the glitterati who lived a long and celebrated life (96 years).

Throughout his many decades of involvement in the arts scene, Neuberger never severed ties to his business or the world of finance. Indeed, he was a person who seemed genuinely comfortable operating in both realms – two worlds that sometimes do not get along so well.

Neuberger even found time to write his memoirs: So Far, So Good – the First 94 Years was published 13 years before his death … and he penned a second book on art collecting as late as 2003.

Clearly, Roy Neuberger was someone who had a real zest for life and who never stopped growing and learning … which surely makes him an inspiration to many. But if that’s not enough for you, just the fact that he lived to be 107 years old is noteworthy in itself!