Re-post: This article first appeared March 3, 2006. As home entertainment evolves and subscriber acquisition costs grow, customer loyalty will have a greater profit impact With more than 3 million subscribers (and climbing), Netflix is the leader in online DVD rentals. Founded in 1999 and rising out of the flames of the dot com bust, […]
“We need emotional content.” The student tries again, and the master intones, “Don’t think. Feeeeel. It is like a finger pointing away to the moon. Don’t concentrate on the finger, or you will miss all of the heavenly glory.”
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 […]
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 […]