News Myopia
I have been reading a seminal essay on marketing by Prof. Theodore Levitt from the Harvard Business Review some 30 years ago (reprinted last year), which talks in part about how companies, or industries, that focus on product, rather than the consumer, are doomed. In other words, if you’re obsessed with your product – making it better, looking at its features, etc. – rather than fulfilling customer’s needs, you’re ultimately setting yourself up for obsolescence, or worse.
I feel media, especially news media, are extremely guilty of this problem. If viewers or readers (consumers) don’t flock to a news program (product), top editors (“product managers”) take a sort of “eat your spinach” approach. People “should” consume this news if they’re good citizens in a democracy. The editors may bemoan the declines but seldom consider how to in a a systematic way determine or fulfill customer needs.
Even focus groups or surveys and research panels have tended to focus more on the existing product — how to improve it, what’s right or wrong with it or the competition — than any sorts of open-ended questions or exploration that would tend to turn up needs, wants or desires. In digital media, Web analytics tell us only the response to the existing product, not how we should define the business moving forward, and use that to determine strategy and tactics.
The New York Times, under Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., has famously defined itself as now being “platform agnostic” – giving users the news they want in whatever medium they want. I agree that’s the best approach, but a deeper and more fundamental question would be to ask folks how they want their news, or what they want from it. Being “platform agnostic” presupposes that the news being gathered and disseminated is already the correct product and it’s merely a question of distribution. But what could be done to better the product from the start to better meet customer needs?
More to come.