Are publishers overthinking their ecommerce strategies?
Are publishers overthinking their ecommerce strategies?Media companies don’t need to achieve Steve Jobs-level product design in order to succeed in ecommerce.Welcome! I'm Simon Owens and this is my media industry newsletter. If you've received it, then you either subscribed or someone forwarded it to you. If you fit into the latter camp and want to subscribe, then you can click on this handy little button: The Daily Wire is now generating $22 million a year from selling its own products — everything from shaving razors to branded merchandise:
What struck me when reading this is that The Daily Wire basically copy and pasted another company’s product and then slapped its own branding onto it. It’s not claiming that it’s invented a new kind of razor that shaves a man’s face any better than its competitors. It merely found a manufacturing partner, developed a brand logo, and then leveraged its massive distribution channels to drive sales. This is a trend you see with other major product launches from media entrepreneurs:
I think the key insight we’re seeing is that media entrepreneurs don’t need to reinvent the wheel when launching new products; they just need to offer a plausible alternative to the products consumers are always buying in droves. Nobody ever needs just one razor blade or one bar of chocolate or one bag of coffee beans, and so if you can find ways to leverage your brand and distribution channels to insert yourself into those purchase cycles, then it’s entirely reasonable to believe that you could build a profitable business. This makes sense when you consider every major name brand that leads its product category. Does McDonald’s make the best cheeseburgers? Does Tylenol make the best pain killer? Does Colgate make the best toothpaste? In each of those categories, the product isn’t all that differentiated from the competition. There really are only two reasons that they’re able to capture so much market share. ... ![]() Continue reading this post for free, courtesy of Simon Owens.A subscription gets you:
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