Q2 2007: Netflix’s Not So Excellent Adventure In August of ’05, I first wrote about the challenge Netflix faces to retain subscribers. With its 2Q 2005 average monthly churn at 4.7 percent, Netflix needed to replace more than HALF of its subscribers every year. Now two years later, average monthly churn for Q2 2007 is […]
Applying magazine lessons to consumer brands If you build it, they will come, or something to that effect, wrote W.P. Kinsella in his 1982 novel “Shoeless Joe.” If you recall the book or its film incarnation “Field of Dreams,” you know that protagonist Ray Kinsella follows that disembodied call to action, carving a baseball diamond […]
…a marketer’s job is in part to move consumers from the periphery to the center of the brand community, (i.e., to increase retention and revenue per customer) and also to attract new customers.
Magazine brand management 101 My friend and colleague Peter Hutchinson is a great writer (and a renowned writing teacher). So as you might imagine, I jumped at his offer to compose a pitch letter to help me place this very series of articles. As I read his draft, I was struck by his description of […]
Sidebar to Publishing as Branding In 1997, two Miller Freeman magazines faced a dilemma. The market they had served for more than a decade was rapidly consolidating. DBMS and DBPD both covered the database software market. (The “DB” in both of them stands for “Database”). The trouble was that while databases were more critical than […]