No Silver Bullet

John Dvorak has a pretty good piece up on Market Watch about Big Media's hopes for the iPad and the incestuous relations between their reviews and these hopes. A particular point he made struck me:

So if you drink the Kool-Aid, you'll be reading Newsweek and Time and all
the dying print magazines and newspapers on the iPad. No matter that you are
not reading these journals now. For some unexplained reason you'll want to read
them on the iPad. How does that make any sense?
The big publishing companies that think that their success or failure is totally dependent on the content delivery mechanism will be in for a surprise. The big winners on the iPad, if any, will be the feet-already-wet publications that have learned from long experience how to produce reader-friendly content for the screen.

This strikes me as about right in manty respects, but still missing the forest for the trees. Yes, the problem with the major media is content, but not in the way Dvorak posits. It's not the flashy bells and whistles of a really cool multimedia presentation that's losing the game for traditional media. It's the substance of the content. The Times, Newsweeks, or even the major metro dailies of the world simply have a problem with adding value with their content. This rests, in no small part, in their attempts to add value via news analysis. On a certain level, it makes sense. It is a hell of a lot cheaper than going out and collecting facts and data.

The problem is that they are absolutely, utterly, and completely terrible at the analysis. This shouldn't come as a surprise. A journalism degree hardly gives you a whole lot of training and insight into economics, finance, geopolitics, or any other subject matter, for that matter. And, despite what many in the senior press corps seem to think, spending a whole lot of time around politicians doesn't make you much of an expert on much more than their individual personalities.

The advent of the online media and the new media, in general, has made the insufficiency of this analysis all too clear for any reasonably sophisticated consumer, although the plethora of disrespected specialty magazines made it noticeable for years. While you can certainly count on reporters to go out and get information, a subject matter expert, someone genuinely passionate and knowledgeable about the topic, can much more easily be counted on to give you a better analysis of those facts. And what the internet has made abundantly clear is that that there is no shortage of subject matter expertise that far surpasses what is available from the major media.

The future of media, then, belongs, not to the traditional major general interest magazines and papers, but to more specialized content providers. To his credit, Rupert Murdoch is one of the few traditional media guys who gets this (Disclaimer: I hold News Corp stock. So, in that respect, I do have an interest in the matter), at least somewhat. His recent defense of his holding of the New York Post was a defense of its sports section. The bottom line is that he views it as a sports paper with a little bit of general interest news added in. News Corp's acquisition of the Wall Street Journal says the same thing. Sure he might try to beat out the NY Times as the major metro for New York, but the bottom line of the business is and will be business news.

In short, if you're really interested in owning publishing as a sector, try to move away from the general interest media (WPC, NYT) and focus on specialty publishers.

Customer Centric Leadership

I recently found this post on the most popular paradigm in business today: customer-centric leadership. Here's the money quote

Here’s a shocker, coming from me. The more I think about it, the more I don’t believe customer-centricity is the key. It’s not a goal, it’s a by-product. It comes as part of the package (often unconsciously) with another principle that is a little more concrete: product-centricity. Product-centric leaders, the ones that are obsessive about what gets shipped out the door, are customer-centric by nature.

This is about right. Truly great companies are not focusing their time effort and money chasing after what the marketing departments thinks the customer wants. Honestly, most customers don't know they want the product that turns out to be the game changer. They don't even know that there is better out there. The author cites Apple, Disney, and Google as prime examples. But think about it, how many people were out there demanding a the I-Pod, Disneyworld, or Google searches before they were introduced to them. Very few. Prior to that almost everyone would have been fine without music when they were walking around, going to Great Adventure, or scrolling through Yahoo. A customer-centric model would almost invariably doom a company to be a follower. What drove these business game changers was a passion on the part of their senior leadership for the product, a knowledge that they could make a product that was truly remarkable.

Or consider another brand that was an absolute game changer: Samuel Adams. I remember when I was young, seeing a movie called Beer. It was, all in all, an idiotic movie. But it had one comment that particularly stuck with me. One of the characters, a brewery CEO, noted "All beer is just the same, piss-colored water with alcohol and bubbles in it.", or words to that effect. He went on to note that the only real difference for beers was marketing. And in the 70s and early 80s, that was about universally true. The major macrobrewers pushed out swill that really defined itself by its marketing, whether Spuds McKenzie or the Swedish Bikini Team. The basic message was the same, drink our beer and you'll get surrounded by hot models in skimpy swimsuits. And, really, to this day, how many people don't want that?

Then, out of nowhere you started to see here and there this new brand. There was virtually no advertising and you paid a premium for it. It certainly wasn't something that beer drinkers were sitting around saying they wanted. But, it was great. If you were lucky enough to live in Philadelphia or Boston in the early 90s, you might have gone to one of the Sam Adams Brewhouses. There, the focus wasn't on being hip or trendy, or even meeting hot chicks, but on the fact that they had really good beer. When Boston Brewing (the company that Makes Sam Adams) started advertising, they did radio spots. I still remember them. They didn't tout the coolness or hipness of their product. Instead, they had this nebbishy sounding guy who started the company telling you about his beer. To this day, rather than dazzling you with images of how cool and hip you'll be as one of their customers, Sam Adams' commercial features the company's employees and owner talking about their beer and how proud they are of it. In short, the focus for these guys was always their beer, their product. If Jim Koch had been customer centric, he would have focused on light beer, or perhaps on marketing itself. Instead, the key ingredient to Sam Adams' success is a passion for the product.

And Samuel Adams has been a game changer. Since the merging of SAB and Miller and the acquisition of Anheuser-Busch by Inbev, Boston Brewing is now America's largest domestic-owned brewer. But that doesn't begin to capture the effect that Sam Adams had on the American beer market. By introducing people to the idea that beer wasn't just piss-colored water with alcohol and bubbles, Sam Adams created a market space for all of the other micro-brewers now thriving in the market, from Brooklyn Brewery and Brew Ommegang in New York to Stoudt's and Yuengling in Philadelphia (Okay, Yuengling has been around a lot longer than Sam Adams, but their star has shot up with the introduction of Yuengling Lager in 1987, roughly coinciding with the rise of Sam Adams.) to the myriad of microbrewers in Portland and Seattle.

Honestly, when you look across brands and products, the real game changers, the ones that bring a smile to your face, are not the brands and products produced by customer-centric managers focused on finding out what the customer wants. They are the successes by people enamored with their product offering something they take pride in. And in the long run, as this chart for Boston Brewing suggests, these brands and products generally make a good long-term investment.

The Unemployment Picture

At The Business Insider, Henry Blodgett posts a graph that suggests pretty strongly that there is not a whole lot of promise in the jobs outlook in the near future. It's a bit of the worst of both worlds. The current recession has shown the worst decline since the recession of 1948. However, recent recessions have shown a much more sluggish recovery in the jobs picture. So, we're likely to see employment remain in the dumps for a good long while.

What this suggests is that the market may be getting a bit ahead of itself in the recent run-up. The current recovery is anything if not fragile, with the consumer side especially sensitive. When you combine that with the fact that the summer rally isn't on a terribly heavy volume, you have a recipe for a fall retreat. Right now, I'd be looking at issues with heavier international exposure, as I think the dollar is facing some longer-term bear pressure and there's a non-trivial case to be made for global growth outpacing the U.S.