Hadfield Road in Cardiff is a haven for the car buyer. It’s just a mile long but straddling nearly every inch of it you’ll find over 20 car dealerships. This proximity to your competitors certainly isn’t unique – pub chains all gather together in city centres. So does the sex industry in London’s Soho, and jewellry in New York’s diamond district around 47th Street. All apply the same phenomenon of proximity.
A similar thing is happening with e-book readers. The iPad launched earlier this year and threatened to decimate existing readers like Sony’s Pocket Reader, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, and, most notably, Amazon’s Kindle. But it appears to have done the opposite as sales of Kindle have trebled this year compared to the first half of 2009.
Amazon is now selling more E-books than they do hardbacks! Just think about that [undisclosed] number for a minute. In an interview with USA Today, Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos said, “I predict we will surpass paperback sales sometime in the next nine to twelve months. Sometime after that, we’ll surpass the combination of paperback and hardcover. It stuns me.”
They’re releasing a new Kindle at the end of August that’s smaller, lighter, better and half the cost. I don’t know if it can launch an artillery strike but it’s going to further enliven their product life cycle.
All this should remind us that the next time competitors threaten to join our market or emulate our products, we should wonder if we cant use proximity to grow the whole together, rather than needing to turn into cannibals. It’s another argument for the thoroughly modern co-opertition, not necessarily competition.
‘Follow us’ and ‘Stay Connected’ buttons are now as commonplace on websites as the word ‘like’ is ever-present in a teenager’s vocabulary.
I’m seeing it in the most unlikely of businesses this year. This photo was taken at a country park. Do you really want to follow and interact with the tweets of a park (it certainly isn’t Disney)? How about the Trainline? Or Firefox?
Yes, Facebook is hooked into 8% of the world’s population (26 million in the UK) but when such buttons become ubiquitous clichés, what will you do to stand out?
Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, is now a year old and it’s been a good one.
They’ve clawed 12.7% of the enormous search market, which is no small feat. And they’ve got what political campaigners crave: momentum. Bing will be powering Yahoo search from this autumn and Yahoo’s got 18.9% of the market. Granted, it’s early days and Google is still undoubtedly the goliath, but there’s plenty of reason to break out the cake.
But what about Twitter? According to its co-founder Biz Stone, Twitter isn’t a social network, “We’re much more like an information network or a source of news.” He’s not kidding as they’re clocking 24 billion search queries a month! Test it yourself here. Look for your company name, your brands, your services, your competitors, your customers – it’s illuminating.
Fast Company have the search big hitters lining up like this:
Google 88 billion searches per mth
Twitter 24 billion searches per mth
Yahoo 9.4 billion searches per mth
Bing 4.1 billion searches per mth
Photo credit: Search Engine Land
Sky have been ordered by the media regulator Ofcom to open up their Sky Sports 1 and 2 channels to competitors. But just before the physical sharing is to take place there’s been a typical Murdoch move.
The wholesale price Sky can charge its (not so friendly) brethren at BT Vision is linked to their own retail price. Sky have lifted their retail, and therefore the wholesale price. This is cutting your nose off to spite your competitor. Of course they knew that BT had advertised the service at £16.99 forcing them into a loss-leader position.
The silver lining on BT’s cloud is that they’ll be the cheapest on the market until they decide the pain is too much to bear. They should vacuum up some price sensitive viewers from rivals, giving Sky an own goal in the short term.
It’s the epitome of bargaining versus negotiation. I met a wonderful professor recently who hit home that there’s a massive difference in the two:
- Bargaining occurs when each party seeks the best outcome for themselves i.e. win-lose (think about buying/selling a car with a complete stranger – you’re bargaining)
- Negotiation occurs when both parties try to ‘create value’ in unity. Our coalition government is a timely example of this win-win situation (they have little without each other).
Sky were forced into negotiating with competitors and turned it firmly into a bargaining situation. When you sit down with that supplier/client next week will you be bargaining or negotiating with them?
Steve Jobs said, “This is really hot,” when he unveiled the iPhone 4 at his Worldwide Developers Conference last month. He wasn’t joking.
It took Apple 72 days to sell a million of their original iPhone when it launched in 2007. Last year, the iPhone 3GS sold a million units in three days, a benchmark it took the iPad took 28 days to achieve. But all these look positively lethargic compared to the iPhone 4 and Apple’s most successful launch in its history: they’ve sold over 1.7 million phones in just three days since its release on June 24.
Estimates for Q3 claim sales of 10.2 million units, rising to 12.2 million for Q4.
The really interesting thing is that 77% of those early sales were to existing iPhone owners. Over three-quarters of sales are to folks who are upgrading! That’s the very definition of a want, not a need.
As Seth Godin might say, seek out committed customers and harvest a tribe by finding/making products for them. Inspire and reship.
Steve Jobs is the ultimate tribe leader. Love him or loath him, make no mistake you’re watching the Pied Piper of tech, folks.
Image from Wired magazine.
