the soft city

Oh ! It’s the Soft City’s best air-musician friend Jimmy Virani on “Amish or Hipster?”

We can reveal the answer: Amish. But hip Amish.

amishorhipster:

Jimmy Virani playing the theremin.

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Upscale fail : Bloom — lower case won’t save you now

Goodbye then, Bloom, favourite upmarket grocery shop of, er, few. Operators Delhaize have decided to retire the banner and its staff. Despite its compelling use of lower case, the banner had failed to pull in the upscale clientele for which it had been conceived. One reason might be its “Chef Inspired” range of products. Frankly, if I’m being asked to splash the cash for a premium supermarket experience I don’t want food “inspired” by a chef. I want food MADE by a chef. Let me put it another way. When I pay for medical treatment, I don’t want an operation “inspired” by doctors. When I fly club class I don’t want to fly in something “inspired” by aeroplanes or get served something “inspired” by Champagne. When I (that’s enough, Ed.)

Sorry for the extended absence. The Soft City has been busy building a sister blog, here. Please visit and follow us. But we are now back and will soon resume our uncharitable comments on business folly.

What’s stopping you …

… just going for it ? We’re living through the end of gatekeepers. The end of publishers, the end of record companies, the end of corporate hierarchies. We’re running out of people and structures to keep us down, wings clipped, face slapped, running out of artificial constructs to exclude or include us. They’ve all been fundamentally disrupted and will never come back together again. The jail door is open. So, what’s stopping you? When you realise it’s you, you’ll do better.

photo via lifeasyouliveit @lifeasyouliveit

(via fuckyeahinstagrams)

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waterstone’s sold (but why do companies wilfully throw away their brand equity?)
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Troubled entertainment retailer HMV (HMV Media Group Plc) has finally offloaded UK book retailer Waterstone’s. This is good. HMV bought Waterstone’s in 1998, for GBP 300 million. At the time it was a successful, if slightly disorganised, bookselling chain. It was respected by staff and customer alike and had a ton of brand equity. Much of its success derived from the devolved autonomy given to branch managers and their staff. They knew their markets, stocked their shelves accordingly and sold passionately to book lovers. This meant that, as a customer, if you wandered in there and needed a recommendation, staff fell over themselves to communicate their enthusiasm. The brand was slightly high-brow, rather upmarket. Not for everyone, but it fitted the principle book buyers.
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HMV took the chain in a direction that made little sense. They wanted to grow the business by capturing the people who never went into book shops. They took Waterstone’s downmarket with aggressive discounting of bestsellers, but more importantly, they attempted to centralise decision-making. They thought that, by making operations as lean and cost-efficient as possible, they would make more money. The opposite happened. By aiming for the mass market, they got laminated by competition from the supermarkets. They also abandoned their unique point of difference. Stripped of their autonomy, branch managers left in droves. So Waterstone’s did what happens so often: they abandoned a lucrative niche to compete for an indifferent punter in an unprofitable, commodity market. The mass customers ignored Waterstone’s. The core customers were alienated. Waterstone’s was no longer remarkable. Result: fail. So. HMV has finally admitted defeat (its CD/DVD stores are also tanking and it needs to slim down) and Waterstone’s has been rescued by Russian billionaire Alexander Mamut, who forked out a mere GBP 53m for it.
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The market for printed books is in long-term decline, but there is still juice in it. As long as Mamut’s top people understand who really buys books and why, and return to selling to them; as long as Mamut does not bury his head in the sand with regard to the shift to e-books but instead carves out a piece of it for Waterstone’s, then the business can be turned around, despite like-for-like declines in double figures. Whether today’s market can support 314 high-street stores, however, remains to be seen. The Soft City rather thinks not.

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Bad investments no. 94 : Skype
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Skype is good. But not 8.5 billion dollars good. Free video calls over the internet is a good idea, which is why Skype has 145 million users a month. But there is a snag: the “free” bit. That’s why Skype made a net loss of 7 million dollars last year. With sales of only 860 million, from charging for calls to landlines and cell phones, it is clearly costing more to run the free bit than Skype can make from the paid bit (gosh, sounds a bit like Spotify; see below). It’s possible a new owner could revolutionise the model and make money from Skype in a way that was popular and really took off … for example, if Facebook had managed to snap it up. Sadly, it’s been bought by Me-Too Microsoft, owners of top search engine Bing and top computer platform Windows. Microsoft is hoping Skype will somehow magically transform its lacklustre VOIP offer, instead of cannibalising its newly-launched cell phone business with Nokia.  But by paying ten times over the odds, MS has set the profitability bar impossibly high for Skype. Good luck with that.

Brand win : YouTube
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Finally! YouTube will offer paid movie rentals on its platform in addition to user-generated cat memes. Apparently, the site managed to sign deals with Warner, Sony, Universal and Lions Gate allowing users to pay about USD 2.99 for a 24-hour rental. The question is – what took them so long? According to ComScore, YouTube is the dominant provider of online video in the United States, with a market share of around 43%. Selling your video content where 43% of people are already going to watch video should be a no-brainer, but the media firms wasted time trying to shut the service down. By not signing deals earlier, the studios deprived themselves of a huge market, effectively granting a six-year monopoly to piracy. The deal will also create competition for Netflix and Apple, which is no bad thing.

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Tea bag win

Tea Bag Art

(via marrypotter)

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Spotify cuts back on free music

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Glad to see they took our advice ;-) But the company hasn’t cut back far enough. Here at the Soft City we love watching media companies grumble that giving services away for free doesn’t seem to be making money for them.

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Bad investments no. 106 : Flip Video

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Cisco acquired Flip Video in 2009 for USD 590 million, certain they were onto a rising market. In fact, it had already peaked, killed off by the iPhone and other smartphones, which usually include video capture as standard. Fast forward to April 2011 and Cisco announces it is shutting down Flip. The Flip was launched in 2007, same year the iPhone launched. Flip is a single-function device; smartphones are multi-function. Multi-function wins. Cisco really should have seen it coming. But didn’t.