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Is the publishing industry stuck in an ivory tower?
June 23, 2010 | 9:15 am
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By Chris Meadows
In my last post, I quoted from a Publishing Perspectives post covering The Big Money’s “Untethered 2010: Profitable Media in the Tablet Era” conference, about how e-reader manufacturers were confident their devices still had a place in a post-iPad world. But reading further in that post, I found more interesting material.
The rest of the article seems to suggest that those manufacturers, and publishers, may be living in an ivory tower—exemplified by this passage:
“As long as we have a competitive marketplace, ultimately consumers will tell us what they want,” [Brian Murray of HarperCollins] said [in a panel about “The Future of Book Publishing”]. “But we need to put that marketplace up quickly.” It was a statement that must have befuddled Sarah Wendell of Smart Bitches, Trashy Books. “How do you not know what the consumers want by now?” she’d asked me during our earlier conversation, in response to another panel where media executives appeared unsure of what readers expected from them. “Consumers are so eager to talk back to companies… I remain eternally dumbfounded by the idea that [publishers] don’t know what consumers want.”
This puts me in mind of the Cluetrain Manifesto, one of the most-often-remembered pro-consumer screeds of the turn of the century. In effect, it said that the Internet was changing the way people communicated, and they way they related to the businesses who made the things they bought, but those businesses were stuck in the old “one-way” paradigm of consumer interaction and weren’t paying enough attention to their customers. Apparently not much has changed since then.
Certainly we’ve seen a lot of signs recently that publishers could stand to pay more attention. As Joanna’s angry post about “hurting authors” demonstrated, there’s a lot of frustration on the consumer end over what e-book publishers and vendors aren’t providing and, it seems, a lot of indifference from the publishers and vendors in question. For publishers to turn around and say that someday they’ll “ultimately” find out what consumers want seems a little insulting.
When consumers have made their feelings known in ways that publishers couldn’t ignore (which seems to be limited to aggregate actions like the one-star “nuclear option” on Amazon reviews—much as authors and publishers complain about consumers reviewing books they haven’t read for “the wrong reasons”, it does seem to be about the only thing they can do that actually works), they’ve been accused of having an “astonishing […] sense of entitlement”. Ever get the feeling you just can’t win?
I can only hope that sooner or later the industry will come to its senses and start to realize what they see as “entitlement”, consumers see as “frustration”. Perhaps they can find a middle ground, if they really want to. Or if they have to.
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Comments:
What the Big Publishers really mean is “someday we’ll find a way to quietly rip-off the customers enough to return to the glory days of living high on the hog”.
And, of course they’re isolated; they cut off all outside input back in the 70′s.
Thing is, their cluelessness as to customers is only matched by their cluelessness about their competitors. Right now, they are fostering a wonderful climate for innovate competitors to incubate under; I mean, who wouldn’t want to compete against entrenched powers going out of their way to alienate buyers and sell their product at a fixed price almost twice the competitive rate? ($12.99-14.99 vs 6.99 paperbacks and ebooks?).
“Sowing the seeds of their own desruction, the Price-Fix Five are.” Or so says a certain short green guy.
Me, I’m thinking: “What goes around, comes around.”
One of the problems with customer feedback is that customers will tell you what they want … and then won’t buy it. When people TALK about what they want, they say publicly acceptable things, like “I think they should serve more salads at McDonalds” — but when MacDonalds adds the salads, people keep right on buying Big Macs. Which they know they aren’t supposed to like or want.
OR, the most talkative customers may not be the most representative customers.
Well, the first thing about customer feedback is to talk to actual customers. And it helps to know who they are so you can tell who is serious and who is just blowing smoke.
Since the big publishers have never seen readers as their customers,but rather the distributors/retailers (hence their shovelware practices), they don’t know *who* to talk to, much less how they actually behave.
Having delegated the day-to-day marketting to retailers, publishers only get–at most–rough chain-by-chain numbers and zero local/demographic data, which is exactly what they would need to know to make rational market-based decisions instead of seat-of-the-pants, darts-on-the-wall ones. The smarter retailers (cough)Amazon(cough) are the ones with the meaningful data and they aren’t about to share it with their (literally) clueless suppliers.
One solution to this is focus groups.
There are also plenty of businesses who can provide accurate market surveys (for a price). These aren’t the dark ages of pre-Nader market-research; the consumer age is 50 years old by now and most other industries adapted their business practices to the shift in power decades ago. Many have in-house usability testing, consumer survey divisions, etc. Most tie market research in with customer support or marketting. Of course, the BPHs don’t do customer support or marketting; they do (limited) promotion of anticipated best-selling titles.
In fact, publishing may just be the absolute last industry to get the message.
(Hey, *somebody* had to be last, I suppose.)