Stick With What You Know

Writer Beware posted this Substack article about the turnaround of Barnes & Noble.  Almost 5 years ago, B&N seemed headed to bankruptcy and probably then its ultimate demise.  But now, against all odds with the pandemic, it seems B&N's brick-and-mortar stores are flourishing.

My local B&N store; they have a nice bathroom.

A big part of the turnaround was hiring a new CEO who basically got things back to basics.  Like a lot of desperate brands, they'd been flailing to try to drum up business.  They'd given over most of their square footage to things that were not books:  cafes, Legos, Pop Vinyls, music, DVDs, and other stuff.  They even apparently tried opening restaurants that had no books at all.

The latter reminded me of when Sears tried to rebrand some of the dying KMart stores as "Sears Essentials."  My thought was always, "Who wants to go to Sears for a bag of chips?"  Or gallon of milk.  Or whatever other small purchase you might make.  Sears was always for higher-end shopping like clothes, appliances, tools, and lawnmowers.  Rebranding KMart as Sears asked customers to completely change their view of Sears in the same way that B&N restaurants would make you have to completely change your view of B&N.  But, really, "Who wants to get dinner at a bookstore?"

Fast food restaurants also exhibit this behavior.  Burger King once sold Domino's Pizza in its stores and frozen Snickers bars and stuff like that.  McDonald's has experimented with pizza, pasta, wings, and other non-sandwich things.  You look at Panera Bread which started off all about salads, soups, and sandwiches and now they've got pasta, pizza, and fried chicken sandwiches.  

A lot of this is probably due to internal or external marketing people spouting buzzwords like "synergy" and "diversify" that sound like smart ideas.  But those "smart" ideas often don't take consumer psychology into account.  "Synergy" sounds like a great idea to combine your brand with some other thing, like B&N restaurants or when Disney created the Mighty Ducks NHL team to go with the movie or when Fox bought the LA Dodgers in the 90s.  But really like I said, Who wants to get dinner at a bookstore?  Or what people think is a bookstore.  When people went to an NHL or baseball game they wanted to watch the game, not a bunch of commercials for other Disney or Fox shit.

Diversity is great for your workforce and diversifying your investment portfolio can help you weather bear markets, but diversifying your product line often doesn't work.  On the surface it seems like a great idea to get more people into your stores.  But again there's the customer psychology to deal with.  When people go to McDonald's they want burgers or chicken sandwiches, not pasta or pizza or wings.  You flood your advertising and menu space with those things and your traditional customers might feel overwhelmed while potential new customers would rather just go to an actual pizza place for pizza and wings and an actual Italian restaurant for pasta.  Not to say that it never works or else McDonald's would still only offer hamburgers and fries, but when you stray too far it starts to have a negative effect.  In the case of B&N, when people go into a bookstore, they want to see books, not have to walk by aisles of toys and collectibles along with CDs and DVDs to find what they want.

So a large part of B&N's recent success was just getting back to basics, as in books.  Print books.  It seems kind of counterintuitive that print books would be more successful than eBooks but there are still a lot of people who like reading print books.  There are some advantages as you can slip in your pocket and not need to worry about charging it or breaking the screen or even getting it wet--at least not as much as an eReader.  And some people just like the old-fashioned experience of the paper and whatever.  And there are Luddites like my mom who just refuse to adapt to any of this newfangled technology.

Another part of the turnaround mentioned in the article is the new CEO gave local stores more autonomy.  Instead of taking money from every publisher and then decreeing that every store had to promote those books, they started letting local stores have more input into what books they would promote and how.  The idea being to make them feel more like the independent bookstores they put out of business 20-30 years ago.  (Remember that B&N is not exactly the "good guy" here.)  When you have less meddling from corporate office overlords, it makes your employees feel more valuable and happier and thus (in theory anyway) they provide better service.

How true all of this is everywhere I can't really say.  I've only been in my local B&N one time since the start of the pandemic and that was to use the bathroom.  I can say they still have pretty decent bathrooms.  Even before that I pretty much only went to the café to get a drink and then sit around (usually outside) to write for a while.  But the numbers say they've turned things around.

Anyway, writers and really anyone engaged in any sort of commercial activity can take something away from this:  stick with what you know.  Don't try to expand too much too fast.  If you're in that rarified air like Stephen King or John Grisham or James Patterson you can get away from your bread-and-butter on occasion, but for most of us, if you find a niche, stick with it.  At least in the general area.  If you're doing well enough, maybe change things up a little so you don't get too stale.  But try to stay within your core competencies.  Or a folksier way to put it:  dance with the one who brought you there.