Been posting this image for nearly twenty years ... no need to change, right? Wait, I'm always asking people to evolve. Oh oh.
That was my young corgi at the time (his name was Bert, and he was 14/10 on the Dog Rates scale). He had a problem with crows.
And by everybody, I mean every incumbent who is about to be sent directly into orbit by new technology.
Do you remember the Lemonheaded comments from catalog leaders back in the 2000-2006 timeframe? I do. They were inescapable. "Ecommerce and Catalogs are the same thing ... the website IS your catalog!!!" Nope. Wrong. Papertarians are still arguing to this day. By 2009 (if I remember correctly) the Catalog Conference ended in New Orleans. Catalog Age went away. DMNews executed the classic "we are hip and modern" gambit with "The Big Fat Marketing Blog" (remember that one?), then they went away. Everything went away. Because ecommerce was not cataloging, even if the same foundational strategies applied to both. Old-school skills were not valued.
The people who disrupted classic catalog marketing are the ones who are about to be disrupted. Every generation is disrupted.
P.S.: I spoke with a 62 year old person who lost his job ... his job (leading one department) was replaced with a position that led four departments. The person hired to replace him was a person with no experience in his industry. Yes, this broke the heart of the 62 year old who spent an entire career doing credible work only to be thrown away and replaced by an inexpensive person with no experience. The 62 year old looked at me and said, "will the young people who did this to me ever get their comeuppance"? Oh yes, they're going to get it. They most certainly will get their comeuppance. The same Search guru who told people that catalog markers were Luddites not deserving of good things doesn't see it yet ... but AI is coming for them, and they'll make the same mistakes the catalog professional did as they are being disrupted.
This is the 5,602nd post I've written ... about 280 per year for twenty years. More in the early years, fewer in the past decade.
There isn't a single entity who's done what I've done the way I've done it ... writing about what I've written about ... for the past twenty years.
There's nothing about what I've done that would be considered a "Best Practice" by the experts.
And yet, I persist.
Might there be a lesson here for your business?
P.S.: At the time I wrote this, I received a newsletter via Substack (#coincidence). The author told readers that their efforts had to be, to paraphrase, "spectacular", in order to get anybody to notice their content. This is empty thought leader advice. Nobody is going to create anything spectacular. Nobody. You aren't Apple inventing the iPhone. You sell widgets, and nobody cares about widgets. Your job isn't to be "spectacular". Your job is to be interesting to your limited audience of prospects who care about widgets.
Did you pay any attention to the NASCAR trial a week ago? Probably not, because it does not impact 994 out of 1,000 of you. But for the six that did pay attention, watching The Teardown on DirtyMo Media (click here), it was as riveting as "content" can get. Michael Jordon suing NASCAR, claiming they are a monopoly, squeezing their own racing teams out of money while generating nine figures of revenue for themselves?
Oh my God, the testimony. The text messages. The emails from team owners to NASCAR. The email from Bass Pro Shops to NASCAR. The Judge begging the parties to settle because he knows that if Michael Jordon wins, it means NASCAR is a monopoly that will be broken up and it will cease to exist as it exists today ... and he knows if Michael Jordon loses, it's the end of his teams, they're done.
I mean, NASCAR thought a hokey twelve-car made-for-tv summer racing series was their "competition". They can't even see that FloRacing is their competition ... Flo essentially has their own sprint car series, they just bought their own late model series, they are aggregating regional series and dirt tracks. On a Saturday night in July, a Flo subscriber can watch a dozen or two dozen main events across the country, each race taking about a half-hour of time. NASCAR Executives have to be asleep at the wheel to not see the threat.
Eventually the testimony was so overwhelmingly against NASCAR that NASCAR elected to settle. The terms of the settlement mean that ALL NASCAR racing teams benefit ... would you do that if you went out on a limb even though the teams you compete against were too cowardly to put their necks out there? Would your terms of settlement help teams that wouldn't help you? That's what Michael Jordon did. He helped all the racing teams with his settlement terms.
In the late stages of a business model, those within the business model become so disconnected from modern realities that they miss the "easy things". I see this in my world ... catalog boutique agencies and #papertarians who are so utterly disconnected from modern commerce that they actually believe Gen-Z loves paper. They'll say absurd things like "74% of marketers believe print has the highest ROI of any marketing discipline." Really? If that was true, what would stop marketers from taking advantage of the highest ROI of any marketing discipline? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. They'd employ the discipline immediately.
Of course, they don't have a Judge helping them understand their shortcomings, they're instead subject to the raw realities of capitalism. Saks comes to mind ... suing Nordstrom because a Chief Merchant is leaving to go to Nordstrom. How utterly clueless do you have to be to believe THAT is your problem? You're nearly bankrupt and that's where you'll spend your remaining $$$ ... on lawyers?
As you get older, this stuff gets exhausting. You've seen the patterns repeat for four decades. You realize there isn't anything that can be done to stop the patterns. You simply hope your readers aren't Lemonheads.
History is littered with the concept of marketplaces.
"Shared money".
The entire purpose of a marketplace is to capitalize on shared money, to a point where more money comes in then goes out.
Cities performed this function in the old days. Think about "downtown" ... shared money as rural people came into the city and spent money ... more money going in than going out. This model was eventually blown up by interstate highways, which pulled retail out of downtown to the interchange. Downtowns died, eventually being repurposed.
Pre-internet, you had direct-to-consumer brands leveraging the marketplaces of their day ... lists and co-ops. Catalogers were nothing more than participants in a large marketplace that had more money coming in than going out. Ecommerce ended their marketplace.
Ecommerce was nothing more than a large marketplace fueled by an opaque network of shady digital advertisers using Google/Facebook/Display Ads as the hub of their activities. This worked well, because more money came into the system than went out of the system ... money was reallocated from suburban malls into the opaque digital advertising system. Of course, Amazon harmed this marketplace with their own marketplace.
Amazon is a gigantic marketplace fueled by algorithms. This worked well, because more money came into the system than went out of the system ... why wander in the Google/Facebook wilderness when Amazon self-contained the entire shopping experience? Of course, Amazon is now being harmed by the latest flavor of marketplace ... Shopify.
The Lemonhead will scream "AMAZON IS NOT BEING HARMED!!". The Lemonhead always defends the "old" business model (they're still defending department stores ... self-contained marketplaces from the pre-internet days). For a period of time, Shopify will have a money advantage (which is the secret of a marketplace), because more money will go into their world than will flow out of their world. This doesn't mean that Shopify will "win" ... but somebody doing what Shopify is trying to do (marketplaces fueled by AI) will create something interesting ... they will find a solution where they bring in more money than goes out of their ecosystem (likely at the expense of Amazon, Google & Facebook).
On the surface, Shopify is a self-contained world for a small-to-medium sized ecommerce brand to sell stuff. Under the covers, Shopify (or somebody who will do Shopify better than Shopify) is a modern marketplace seeking to bring in more money to the ecosystem than leaves the ecosystem.
Losing companies tend to over-focus on two ends of the spectrum ... on the 30,000 foot view of commerce (will ChatGPT supplant Google) or the 3 foot view of commerce (can Buy Now Pay Later grow sales for us). Both are important. Between 3 feet and 30,000 feet is where the Lemonhead does not understanding the Shopify effect on ecommerce ... the goal of every company is to bring more money into their ecosystem than goes out of their ecosystem. Which means, of course, if you are a $70,000,000 ecommerce brand, you have to figure out how to use all of these "ecosystems" to your advantage so you have more money coming in than going out.
Or as the pundits say, BNPL.
BNPL is what losing looks like. If you believe that the problem with your business (which means you are already losing, by the way) is that customers can't pay for your merchandise today, the solution isn't to give away product and get paid next year.
BNPL and Credit cause a whole series of interrelated and completely awful outcomes. I know this to be true ... having worked for Eddie Bauer (owned by a credit crazed parent named Spiegel) and Nordstrom, it's a different environment when the credit people enter the room. They don't care about what you sell. They care about 29% interest and capturing data. They want to turn a $400 handbag into a $466 handbag at twelve payments of $38.80 each.
Strong Analytics Hint: Analyze the long-term value of a customer who buys a $400 handbag for $466 spread out over twelve months ... see if that customer behaves differently than a customer who pays $400 for a handbag. This is where a BNPL mouth breather says "yeah but the customer paying $400 for the handbag is paying Visa interest so why shouldn't the brand get the interest instead of Visa?" The reason, dear Lemonhead, is that over five years you slowly build a customer base of credit dependent customers who owe both Visa and you interest, those customers prefer a specific portion of your merchandise assortment which means your merchants slowly cater to credit-dependent buyers instead of those who love your products/merchandise ... your "brand" has been harmed. Take a look at the evolution of the merchandising assortment of credit buyers vs. third party payment (i.e. Visa) buyers ... it's different. Seriously ... do the work.
Losing companies manipulate payments.
Winning companies sell merchandise customers are ready to pay for today.
Bad behavior has happened forever. I spent nine months in the dot.com era at a retargeting startup. It seemed like every-other-week my company issued a press release suggesting that the fired individual was leaving "to spend more time with his/her family".
All sorts of awful behavior have been sprung on society in the past decade. These things go in cycles ... there will be bad cycles and then there are the horrific cycles we experience today. There aren't many good cycles. Go back four thousand years ago, there weren't many good cycles back then, either.
Always remember that when society goes bad, your business can represent good. There is a strong business case to be made for being good. Unfortunately, it's too easy to profit from being bad.
Which brings me to this bizarre commentary of modern retail.
Sure he does.
Who, specifically, describes their leadership style as "highly adaptable"? How specifically do you know that you are "highly adaptable"? Did you ask your employees? And "wartime agility"? My goodness. The worst thing is that some Lemonhead is going to embrace this vapid nonsense.
Did Macy's pay to get this pabulum published?
I get all the teasers ... back in the day it was trade journalists asking for feedback ... then it was trade journalists asking for money ... now it is third party content harvesters offering to help me craft articles that get published in Business Insider or Forbes ... "YOU ONLY PAY IF YOUR CONTENT IS ACCEPTED". Well of course it is going to be accepted, that's how everybody makes money ... except for me.
Anytime you see a retail thought leader publish on Substack that they contribute to Forbes, run away ... don't walk away from the content. As the kids say, the content is "sus".
Here's how one company targeted me with email discounts/promotions.
In 2005, retail brands thrived via mall-based retail, classic cooperation between competitors. Having a Nordstrom anchor on one end of the mall and a Neiman Marcus anchor on the other end of the mall benefitted Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus, the food court, Sunglasses Hut and Talbots. At Nordstrom, we knew that when Neiman Marcus built a store at one of our locations, our sales increased. Neiman Marcus customers walked across the mall and purchased from us.
The catastrophic outcome of the omnichannel thesis soon followed. When the Nordstrom customer bought online from Nordstrom, there were no ancillary purchases at Neiman Marcus, because the customer didn't have to visit the mall anymore. The absurd silliness of "buy online pickup in store" did not push the customer to the mall - my clients simply pushed the customer to the digital ecosystem and the mall emptied.
When traffic disappeared, the weakest clients, those with pre-tax profit < 5%, those businesses suffered first. They closed locations, which meant even less traffic. As locations closed, the cooperation that once caused businesses to thrive became untenable. Better to protect your p&l than to protect J. Crew.
Eventually (i.e. 2024-2025), a semblance of equilibrium finally existed. The Lemonheaded omnichannel experts moved on to their next pursuit ... AI. I was always amazed at how little these omnichannel experts knew about actual retail and actual customer behavior. They simply could not conceive how encouraging online shopping (which was going to happen no matter what) would destroy in-store mall-based consumerism, even though it was their job to understand this simple outcome. Do you trust these Lemonheads with a fusion of vision, strategy, and AI?
No. You do not trust them.
What do you think happens when ChatGPT or Shopify or others offer viable ecommerce "cooperation platforms" fueled by AI? It likely only takes a 10% drop in shopping traffic on Google / Facebook for those forms of cooperation to collapse. Just like that, you've got less traffic and you've done nothing to cause less traffic. It'll be like a digital mall collapsing.
We saw catalog brands emptied out by ecommerce.
We saw retail brands emptied out by the omnichannel thesis.
Imagine what happens to traditional ecommerce brands when AI actually takes hold?
It's going to take awhile and hundreds of billions of dollars will be incinerated in the process while we run low on water powering data centers, but a new form of commerce is coming ... and this time, the cooperation-based digital world of marketplaces / Google / Facebook / ecommerce is the one that will likely be transformed. Not eliminated (there are plenty of malls and there are many catalogers still in business), but transformed. Transformation is a difficult process for Lemonheads to deal with.
The best businesses I work with balance merchandise, marketing, and creative.
Cyber Monday obviously skews strongly to pricing ... no need for marketing / creative brilliance. That's how Thought Leaders like things ... they either make everything so complicated you couldn't possibly execute properly (#omnichannel) or they pick a corner of the triangle above and tell you that excellence in one area equates to excellence in all areas.
With Christmas a few weeks away, large businesses are applying their version of the "triangle" above to coax customers into orders. Tis the season for the image they believe will convert a customer to an incremental order. Any similarities?
When the largest "brands" all choose one direction, you have an opportunity to choose another direction. Kohl's / Macy's / Target / Walmart all clearly view the world through the eyes of a specific type of female aligned with the color "red".
Ecommerce is begging for somebody to be creative. It's one thing to optimize boring/sterile Facebook Ads paired with 60% off on Cyber Monday. It's another thing for agencies to recommend one type of woman as your "idealized consumer". It's difficult to walk away from that world and chart your own course via creative strategies. But it's necessary as we move into 2026.
He bought canned pineapples, it's part of the record!
"... consumers shopping mainly at supermarkets".
Look around, because we are constantly being reminded what happens when we put non-smart people in charge of things, or worse, give them access to a megaphone.
"... consumers shopping mainly at supermarkets".
" ... according to a survey".
Buried deep on the Headphones.com website is this (click here for proof). The comments were obviously staged as well, and are delightful.
I share this with you after enduring a day of absolute Cyber Monday pummeling. One "brand" sent me six email messages promoting Cyber Monday, offering 60% off. Three went straight into my junk folder, three persevered and made it to my inbox.
When you don't have a creative bone in your org structure, you send six email messages on Cyber Monday promoting 60% off. It's all you have - you are begging the customer to buy something on a day that generates customers who have low long-term value. You'll spend the rest of the year offering more discounts because rebuy rates are too low. You'll spend eternity doing this, you can't get out of the cycle. You populate your customer file with the worst possible customers, the ones who only purchase "because it is a game".
You do not want those customers.
And yet?
So darn many of you keep attracting those customers.
Give creativity a try. It won't work at first - it can't work when the customer has been trained to accept enormous discounts. It is the path out, however.
Been posting this image for nearly twenty years ... no need to change, right? Wait, I'm always asking people to evolve. Oh oh. That was ...
