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Can you even remember racing to the video store to avoid late charges?

Not to date myself or anything, but can anyone else remember going to the video store on a Friday or Saturday night? I’d wander the aisles and take a look at every movie on the “just released” rack in order to decide which one or two videos I was going to rent. Netflix and the Internet have pretty much killed the video store these days and so what’s a video store product manager to do?

(Streaming) Video Killed The Video Store

To be a video store product manager in the 1990s was the bomb! Everyone finally had a VCR in their house and the movie studios were cranking out movies, both new and old, on video tape left and right. Your only real problem was trying to get your stock level right so that you could meet the needs of most of your customers.

Almost overnight everything changed. Those darn DVDs came along. Sure, you could start to replace the tapes in your stores with DVDs, but all of a sudden the product managers over at Netflix discovered that you could cheaply use the U.S. postal mail to send DVDs to people’s homes. Oh, oh – now your video store was under threat. There was nothing on anyone’s product manager job description that told how to handle this situation.

As though things couldn’t get even worse, they did. Since so many consumers now had high-speed internet service to their house, the Netflix product managers moved on to the next stage of their game: offering streaming video and making it so you didn’t even have to wait by your mailbox anymore.

Given all of these superior ways to get your hands on the latest and greatest videos, why would anyone still make the trek to the video store and run the risk of incurring late fees? There are some people for whom a weekend video is still a spur-of-the-moment purchase. These last remaining people were vacuumed up when the product managers from Redbox placed their self-service DVD rental kiosks outside of 7-11′s and other stores. That’s it, game over for the video stores.

How Video Stores Are Being Reborn

But wait, all of the video stores have not gone away. Sure, sure – the big chain ones like Blockbuster and Hollywood Video have been closing their doors left and right. However, a number of the independent video stores are still open for business. What have their product managers been doing?

A number of the video stores have changed the products that they offer to their customers. Some have started to offer events. Nicole LaPorte from the New York Times reports that these have included a film studies program, classes on anime mythology, lectures by filmmakers and spoken word events. Clearly, this isn’t your father’s Blockbuster store.

What you’re starting to see is that place that we used to go to rent video tapes is transforming itself into more of a community gathering place or a cultural hub for people who really like films. The video store product managers are positioning their products to be different than Netflix which clearly has no soul: it is both nameless (who is sending me those videos?) and faceless (exactly where is Netflix located?).

Video Store 2.0

All of this “connect with your customers” strategic management stuff is good short-term product manager positioning. However, what should video store product managers be doing in order to prepare for the long-term?

Dr. Peter Fader is a very smart marketing professor at the University of Pennsylvania who thinks that he knows the answer. Here’s the most important point that he makes: as easy as it would be to do, video stores that want to survive must not consider Netflix as an adversary. Netflix is just too easy to use and if you position them as the enemy, then you’ll force your customers to choose and in the long run the video store will lose.

Dr. Fader has a different suggestion. He believes that video stores should position themselves as an alternative to Netflix. Yes, when people want to watch the summer’s latest action flick, they’ll turn to Netflix. However, when they want a film that might not be in the mainstream, one that is a bit harder to find and which Netflix doesn’t have, that’s when the video store can step in.

The video stores’ current efforts to provide film based events at the store is another great way to supplement what their customers are getting from Netflix. Instead of thinking of video customers as having to pick either Netflix or the local video store, instead start to think of the video store as just being a part of a video watcher’s portfolio of video information sources. This is the path to a video store’s long-term success.

What All Of This Means For You

As product managers we all seem to spend our time trying to figure out how we can make our products more successful. We scheme and plan ways to capture another 1% of market share. What we rarely spend any time thinking about is the very real possibility that one day our whole market might just vanish.

Video stores had this happen to them with the arrival of Netflix and Redbox. The video stores that didn’t adapt, are now gone. The ones that realized what was happening and who have transformed themselves are still here. In order to survive in the long run, these stores are going to have to create an entirely new market for themselves and find a way to coexist with the new video delivery services.

Product managers should learn from this story that the game is never over even when your account manager or business development manager starts to panic. The rules might change, the players might change, and how we keep score may be done differently. However, as long as you have the ability to roll with the punches, your product can deal with almost any change that comes along and you’ll emerge on the other side stronger and better for the adventure. Now put that on your product manager resume!

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Product Management Skills™

Question For You: If you were the product manager for a video store, how would you hold on to the customers that you already have?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

I’m sure that any product manager living in the U.S. has encountered one of the Capital One ads for their credit cards at some point in time over the last year or so. What might get lost in the blizzard of Capital One ads and promotions that seem to always be around us, is that the product managers at Capital One are very good at what they do. Perhaps we can learn something from them…

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Should A Product Manager Let Their Customer's Fingers Do The Walking?

When I was first out living on my own, the arrival of the latest copy of the yellow (and white) pages was a big deal. Since my parents had always received these huge volumes, when I got mine I felt that somehow I was now a “grown up”. Fast forward to the 21st Century and man have things changed. There still are Yellow Pages®, but is it possible that owning this product is the worst product management job ever?

What Happened To The Yellow Pages

Once upon a time the Yellow Pages ruled the world of local search. Everybody in the U.S. had a phone and we all got service from the same phone company, AT&T, so it was simple for AT&T to create a Yellow Pages product and drop it off on the doorstep of each one of their existing customers.

Then things started to get weird. AT&T got broken up by a Federal judge. All of a sudden, we still had AT&T, but we also had 7 local new companies that provided local telephone service. There was also a bunch of new guys who were starting to also provide local phone service. What this meant is that if you had a phone, then you started to get multiple Yellow Pages-like books dropped off on your doorstep.

Just to make things even more complicated, the online world started to explode. The mean that the stronger local provides could start to push their online equivalents of the Yellow Pages such as SuperPages.com (offered by Verizon). In case that didn’t confuse you enough, both Yahoo and Google started to customize the results that people started to get when they’d do searches for local businesses.

What A Yellow Pages Product Manager Could Be Doing

Pity the poor Yellow Pages product manager. Once upon a time he/she was king/queen of the hill in the kingdom of local search. However, now they are just another player and they keep finding themselves losing ground to the new entrants (when you own a market, what else can happen to you?)

The local search marketing agency TMP Directional Marketing | 15miles, did a study of how consumers were searching for information on local businesses. What they found was that in the 3 years from 2007-2009 consumers reported that their use of the print version of the Yellow Pages to find a local business went down by 5% during that time. This was coupled with 71% consumers reporting that they use the print version of the Yellow Pages less than once a week.

So what’s a print Yellow Pages product manager to do? I believe that this is one of those marketing conditions that screams out for “out of the box thinking”. Here are three ideas for what Yellow Pages product managers could do:

1. Syndicate: What this means is that when a local business agrees to place an ad with the Yellow Pages, make sure that that ad starts to show up in more places than just the printed book that gets dropped off at people’s houses. Dare I say that the Yellow Pages needs to become a portal? Instead come up with a way to offer local discounts and promote a vendor-of-the-day, etc.
2. Go Mobile: let’s face it, who wants to take the time to find their printed copy of the Yellow Pages let along open it up and try to find what you are looking for when you can do the same thing quicker on your mobile phone? The Yellow Pages needs to come up with a local search “app” that everyone instinctively uses when they want to find a local business.
3. Get Social: Give it up – Facebook is here to stay. There has to be a Yellow Pages angle to all of the social networking that everyone is doing. Yellow Pages product managers need to become the conduit between their advertisers and the local customers who are using everything from Facebook to Twitter.

What All Of This Means For You

Don’t laugh at the yellow pages product managers too loudly – you could be in a similar situation with your product some day in the future. What we need to do is to understand how they got into this situation and what they are doing to get out of it.

The Yellow Pages is a product that competes in a market segment called “local search”. Once upon a time, the big Yellow Pages book that got dropped off at everyone’s house owned this market. Now new competitors such as Google Maps have taken the lion’s share of the market away from the Yellow Pages.

Yellow Pages product managers need to be willing to change with the changes in their market. This means that they need to find ways to have their product be effective in multiple channels. Additionally they will need to move aggressively into new media areas such as mobile devices in order to remain relevant.

Being a Yellow Pages product manager is not an easy job. However, if you really wanted to go to work every day and face a challenge that would allow you to make a difference, then perhaps the Yellow Pages is the place to be!

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Product Management Skills™

Question For You: If you were a product manager who was responsible for the Yellow Pages product in your area, what would you be doing right now?

Click here to get automatic updates when
The Accidental Product Manager Blog is updated.

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Product Manager Newsletter are now available. It’s your product – it’s your career. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Not to date myself or anything, but can anyone else remember going to the video store on a Friday or Saturday night? I’d wander the aisles and take a look at every movie on the “just released” rack in order to decide which one or two videos I was going to rent. Netflix and the Internet have pretty much killed the video store these days and so what’s a video store product manager to do?

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NCR Is Getting Into The DVR Rental Business – Bad News For redbox

Who Doesn’t Like A Little Competition?

There’s not a product manager out there who doesn’t dream of the day in which their product is the only show in town. Man – wouldn’t that be great? You wouldn’t have to worry about any real competition, you’d just be spending your time working to grow the market. And then you wake up.

The new-kid-on-the-block firm Redbox who has taken the DVD rental market by storm with their low-price, limited selection kiosks that have been popping up everywhere. For the longest time it looked like it would be a Redbox vs. Netflix battle. However, things have changed.

There’s a new gorilla in town: NCR. Just a little while ago NCR purchased Houston-based TNR Holdings which was a smaller player, but they were in the kiosk DVD rental business also. This wouldn’t be all that remarkable if the product managers at NCR hadn’t done something else interesting: gotten into bed with Blockbuster.

The NCR product managers have somehow talked Blockbuster into licensing its brand to NCR. This allows Blockbuster to take a cut of rental revenue from the kiosks. Hmm, I had sorta thought that Netflix had Blockbuster on the ropes. Is this a way for the Blockbuster product managers to stage a rebound (“don’t call it a comeback”)?

What Does This Mean For Redbox?

As though things weren’t heating up enough for the Redbox product managers, the latest news is that NCR is acquiring DVD Kiosk operator DVDPlay Inc. and plans on converting its 1,300 kiosks to the Blockbuster Express brand name. Now we’re starting to talk about a lot of kiosks.

What makes this latest purchase by NCR even more interesting is that it will give NCR a leg up in one of Redbox’s weakest markets: California. As product managers are all too painfully aware, it’s a lot harder to boost your product’s market share when you have to take market away from your competition!

That deal that the NCR product managers struck with Blockbuster seems to be paying off. NCR is reporting that converting kiosks to the Blockbuster brand appears to boost their traffic significantly. Think about it, would you rent a DVD from NCR? No way; however, when you see the Blockbuster name and the blue and gold colors you start to think about Friday nights and relaxing at home in front of the TV.

Remember, the key to this product’s success is volume. The kiosks rent out movies for as little as $1 per night. In order to boost their volume so that they can compete with Redbox better, as NCR replaces the DVDPlay kiosks with the Blockbuster kiosks, they plan on moving them to better locations. Some of these locations include moving them outside of stores so that people can still access them even when the store is closed.

The 900 lb Gorilla In The Room

Gosh, you’re thinking, it looks like the Redbox product managers now have their hands full. Wait a minute, it gets even more complicated. Redbox’s low-price marketing strategy has been so successful that some studios try to keep their newest releases out of kiosks to avoid devaluing the same products that they are trying to sell in stores for $30.

Kiosks operators like Redbox have been trying to get around this problem by buying DVDs in quantity from either Walmart or Best Buy. The bad new is retailers have caught on to this strategy and are now putting restrictions on how many DVDs kiosk operators can purchase. In some cases they are restricting purchases to just three of any single title.

Redbox has antitrust suits pending against Twentieth-Century Fox, Warner Bros., and Universal Pictures.

New Competition Is Arriving Every Day

As though having competition from a large firm with deep pockets that has gotten into bed with one of your biggest established competitors wasn’t enough, there are the other start up firms that Redbox still has to worry about.

Mosquito Productions has a BigBox DVD kiosk that contains between 2,000 – 3,000 DVDs compared to 500 for Redbox and 950 for Blockbuster Express.

In a business with very low barriers to entry, Redbox needs to anticipate that there will be even more firms like this showing up over time.

What All Of This Means For You

What the Redbox product managers are going through should serve as an example for all of us. It’s great to be one of the first entrants into a new market and to be successful for awhile. However, we all have to remember that success is like blood in the water and it will attract other sharks soon enough.

Once competition heats up product managers need to shift some of their focus from growing their market share to holding on to what they already have. This means that they need to find ways to differentiate their product.

This might be a great time for Redbox to start to develop a “frequent renter” program in order to allow customers to build up “credits”. This could help customers decide to choose a Redbox kiosk over any others when they have a choice.

What do you think Redbox’s next step should be?

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P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Product Manager Newsletter are now available. It’s your product – it’s your career. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

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How Will Microsoft

What’s a product manger to do when your #1 competitor is your own product? What can you do if you spend a lot of time and money developing a new version of your product and then roll it out and the customers that you want to sell it to appear to be happy using the old version of your product? This is exactly the situation that Microsoft’s Office product managers now find themselves in…

Done In By Their Own Success

Everybody knows what Microsoft’s Office product is don’t you? It’s the premier suite of business software tools that just about everybody uses everyday (this article is being written in Microsoft Word). The very fact that it’s so popular is what creates such a challenge for its product mangers.

Office 2010 is the next version that is getting ready to be rolled out. It’s got a bunch of fancy new features that are going to permit people to simultaneously work on documents, link into Facebook, etc. But are people going to buy it?

Over at the research company Gartner Inc., they’ve done some interesting studies on just how many people have been willing to upgrade their perfectly good versions of Office to a new version in the past. Only 60% of current Office users bothered to upgrade to Office 2003 when it came out. When Office 2007 came out, somewhere between 50-55% of users upgraded to it. I wonder how things will go for Office 2010?

Why Not Just Go Ahead And Upgrade?

As product managers, we can get very close to our products. Maybe too close. When we roll out a new version of an existing product, we can fool ourselves into thinking that all of our existing customers will of course want to upgrade to it because it has so many cool new features. But that’s just the problem, they are features, not benefits.

What we too quickly overlook is that from our customer’s point-of-view, any upgrade is a pain in the butt. There are a lot of hassles and expenses involved. Sure there is the cost of the new product (didn’t I already pay for this?) but then there is also the retraining that is involved. Once a customer takes into account just how large their user base is, both of these disruptions can quickly become too much to put up with.

Oh, Oh — Microsoft Is Late To The Party

Oh, there’s one more thing that the Microsoft product managers have to worry about. As you can well imagine, past versions of the Office product don’t do everything that customers want. Well guess what: a bunch of companies have seen this market opportunity and have dived right in.

Small start-ups that are run by former Microsoft employees have created tools that can be added to existing versions of Office that provide many of the key new features that Office 2010 will provide — without the hassle of upgrading. Some of these firms are Xobni (email search), DocVerse (collaboratively edit documents over the Internet), Gist (interface email to social networking sites), and Xiant (helps to file email more efficiently).

This, of course, makes life even more difficult for Microsoft’s Office product managers. Why should existing customers upgrade if they can already get the new product’s key new functionally simply by adding free or low cost plugins to their existing software?

What All Of This Means For You

The Microsoft Office product managers have a challenge on their hands. They have a very successful product; however, now they have a new version of the product and they want as many of their existing customers to decide that the expense and hassle of upgrading is worth the effort.

Just to make things even more difficult, an entire industry has sprung up creating add on products that eliminate some of the most obvious customer pain points that Microsoft could normally use to motivate customers to upgrade. This limits Microsoft’s options.

What should be most important for product managers everywhere is that Microsoft has deep pockets and they realize that they have a problem here. I suspect that we’re going to seem a full out push to motivate customers to upgrade: advertising, pricing, and incentives will all be used. We should all take careful notes and learn what works so that we can use it the next time we upgrade our product…

Do you think that Microsoft should lower the price of their Office 2010 product in order to get people to upgrade?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Is there any part of a product manager’s job that is more exciting then being responsible for introducing a new product? For that matter, is there any experience that can be more nerve racking than introducing a new product? If only there was some way that we could take out “flop insurance” that would help to prevent our becoming known as the product manager who introduced the next “new Coke” disaster…

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PayPay Is No Longer The Only Game In Town

You would think that if your product was the biggest one in it’s market, you’d be sitting pretty as a product manager, right? Sure, this might be an easy trap to fall into; however, if you start to take it easy once you are the king of the hill, then that’s when your competition shows up and knocks you off. Over at the big online payment processor PayPal, their product managers are currently doing quite well. However, they can see the handwriting on the wall and are taking some bold steps to remain #1…

What Me Worry?

If you want to have a successful product that everyone needs, then the world of online payment processing was the business to go into awhile back. Something like a zillion dollars gets exchanged online everyday and right now there’s pretty much one main player in this industry: eBay’s PayPal unit.

As product managers we all realize that when you become very successful, that is a signal for other companies to create products to compete with you. It’s taken awhile, but now the PayPal product managers are starting to see some competition. Serious competition. This when product managers need to be extra careful and not make marketing mistakes.

And In This Corner We Have…

Don’t get me wrong, the PayPal product managers have created a very good product and they’ve listened to their customers and they’ve made it very easy to use. However, this market is too big right now and growing too fast not to attract some highly qualified competition.

Amazon.com currently sells just about everything on the planet. Amazon.com already has a huge customer base and enormous computing power. They are looking to leverage this with a new transaction processing service that they are calling “Pay-Phrase” . The Amazon.com product managers are betting that if they make it even easier to shop with them, then more people will do so.

Google offers the most direct competition in their “Google Checkout” payment processing system. One of their greatest strengths going forward is that this service has been integrated into the Android mobile operating system.

Facebook may represent the greatest threat to the PayPal product manager’s long term success. Simply put, Facebook’s user base of over 300 million users gives it an unprecedented reach into the consumer market. This is exactly what any online payment processing company needs in order to succeed.

The Facebook product managers have created a virtual currency called Facebook Credits that can be used to buy both virtual and real goods. Right now only a few vendors are using these credits to allow users to buy things, but that may all change quickly. Facebook has opened up a gift shop that accepts Facebook credits and they are starting to sell both virtual goods as well as products from other companies. This sure sounds like what they talked about in that book The Innovator’s Dilemma…

How PayPal Product Managers Are Fighting Back

As you might expect, the PayPal product managers are not taking this competitive challenge lying down. They believe that the key to their long-term success is to make their payment processing system an integral part of many different products so that it will always be there ready to be used by consumers.

In order to make this happen, they are preparing to rollout a new system that will make it easier for software developers to integrate the PayPal system into their own applications. This new software, called PayPal X.

The key goal of this new software is to eliminate the need for customers to have to sign into a separate PayPal web site in order to complete their purchase. Instead, they’ll be able to complete it without leaving the web site that they are on.

What All Of This Means For You

All product managers dream of being responsible for a wildly successful product. The PayPal product managers have clearly succeeded in achieving this dream. What is interesting for the rest of us to observe is what they do now: do they rest on their laurels or do they kept moving forward?

Clearly PayPal’s competition has shown up in force in the guise of both Amazon.com and Facebook. Both of these companies have the luxury of having been able to watch what PayPal has done and learning from their mistakes. The products that the competition rolls out will pose a serious threat to PayPal.

Before you start feeling too sorry for those poor successful PayPal product managers, realize that they seem to have realized that they are facing a threat and are taking steps to stay in the lead.

For the rest of us, I believe that the message from this competition needs to be that no matter how successful our product becomes, we can never take it easy. We will always have competition, it’s what we do to meet it is what determines how successful we will be as product managers.

What do you think that Google has to do in order to be a true competitor to PayPal?

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P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Product Manager Newsletter are now available. It’s your product – it’s your career. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

What’s a product manger to do when your #1 competitor is your own product? This is exactly the situation that Microsoft’s Office product managers now find themselves in…

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Yahoo Product Managers Have Found A Way To Beat Google

If you had the choice of being a product manager at either Yahoo or Google, which company would you choose? I’m going to go out on a limb and say that most of us would choose to work at Google.

The press is filled with glowing stories about how great everything that Google touches is. Of course, there’s the free food at work angle also. Likewise, Yahoo has been getting savaged in the press as they lose visitors, botch marketing agreements with Microsoft, and generally drop the ball.

However, it turns out that we might be making the wrong decision. In the battle for capturing viewers for financial information, the Yahoo product managers are winning the battle hands down…

Statistics Don’t Lie

Randall Stross over at the New York Times has taken a close look the ongoing battle between Google and Yahoo for Web users who are looking for timely financial news. You might think that things are close or that Google is coming on strong. You’d be wrong. Right now Yahoo’s financial site is attracting 17.5x the traffic that Google’s financial site is getting. You read that correctly: not 2x, not 10x, but 17.5x!

This is not a recent occurrence either. For the last 19 months (1.6 years if you care) Yahoo Finance has been #1 in this category. Google is currently ranked 17th. Yahoo was able to attract 21.7M unique visitors while Google has only been able to attract 1.2M unique visitors.

What Yahoo Product Mangers Are Doing Right

In talking with Yahoo’s product managers Stross found that they had taken the time to sit down with their target audience and discover what they wanted – and what they didn’t want. This research revealed that the more financial information that was presented to users, the greater their anxiety became.

Once the Yahoo product team had this break-through realization, they went ahead and took a page out of Apple’s product playbook and created a very simple design that had a clean look that didn’t overload the visitor with too much information.

The Yahoo team also realized that one of their greatest assets was other Yahoo sites. The Yahoo Finance team developed a great relationship with the Yahoo’s front page team and they have worked together to identify what topics the Finance team could cover that would allow the front page team to send traffic to them.

Yahoo has achieved this product success with very little original content. In fact, only about 5% of the Yahoo Finance site’s information is original. Yahoo realizes that this is a weakness and they plan on boosting this to 10% in the future.

Does Google Have The Better Product?

Does anyone remember the VHS vs. Beta video tape format wars that happened so many years ago? It sure looks like we are looking at a repeat of this once again. Google arguably has a technically superior financial site.

Goggle’s strategy so far has been to offer visitors the best financial data and charts. In the case that this is not enough, Google comes back and offers them even more data and charts.

One of the biggest drawbacks that the Google Finance team has is that Google’s home page does not have a clear link to the Google Finance page. It’s entirely possible that a visitor to the Google home page may never learn that the Google Finance page even exists because the only reference to it is buried in a list of menu items.

One clear advantage that Google has over the Yahoo Finance page is that they offer free real-time price quotations obtained directly from the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq. Yahoo Finance on the other hand gets its stock prices from the BATS Exchange and they have a delay of roughly 1 minute.

Google visitors get real-time stock prices for free, Yahoo visitors have to pay for access to real-time quotes – $10.95 or $13.95 / month (NYSE or Nasdaq).

Final Thoughts

Who’s going to win this battle? You would think that that with Google’s deep pockets they would eventually come out the victor. However, it appears as though Google’s product managers still don’t get it.

A case in point is Google’s new set of stock price charting tools that they call “Technicals“. These tools allow users to analyze stock prices over time using 12 different technical formulas. Based on what Yahoo has discovered about visitors to financial information pages, this new set of features will not boost Google’s draw.

In the end, the product managers at Yahoo Finance understand that the best way for a free financial site to prosper is by including less mathematics and more entertainment. The winner of this battle will inform their users just enough to answer their questions without causing them any unnecessary anxiety.

Product managers at Yahoo who are able to stay tuned into what their finance customers are really looking for will have have found yet another way that great product managers make their product(s) fantastically successful.

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The Accidental Product Manager Blog is updated.

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

How are you at walking and chewing gum at the same time? It’s sorta a classic challenge – do two different things simultaneously and do them well. Product managers are facing the challenge today – cut the cost of their product and simultaneously use innovation in order to make their product more competitive. How hard can that be?

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