[Resource of the Day] — The Changing Consumer

Today’s article: The Changing Face of the U.S. Consumer
by Peter Francese
Source: Advertising Age.com

The other day, I posted up an article about rethinking WHY consumers buy. Today, I want to offer an article that talks about who these consumers are.

One of my frustrations in dealing with many small publishers is that they create products without deciding whom they’re trying to develop them for. Often when I’ve talked to people trying to pitch comics and I ask them, “who’s your target audience for this?”, they have a vague idea at best about who they expect to pick up their book every month.

As I’ve said many times on this site, one of the most important aspects of developing a product is developing your marketing. And in order to do that, you’ll need to develop an STP plan (segmenting, targeting and positioning). And in order to do THAT, you’ll need to understand the base of consumers available.

But before you get started, you need to realize something rather important: that demographic of 16-24 that most US comic book creators want to attract? They’re actually a pretty small market right now compared to the rest of the US population. The two biggest consumer markets right now are ages 35-44 and 45-54; they account for 49% of consumer spending in the US. And over the next ten years, these groups are going to shrink as these consumers enter the 55+ demographic… and shift from a consumer mentality to a service mentality.

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[Resource of the Day] – Rethinking Consumer Behavior

This summer, I’m finishing my undergraduate degree in Business Administration (with an emphasis on Marketing) and preparing myself for graduate school, where I’ll be working towards my Master in Marketing Research (MMR) degree. I actually only needed to take three classes this summer to get enough credits to move on, but I decided to add a fourth, “Consumer Behavior,” because I thought it would be an important class to take.Sadly, the class text doesn’t have a lot of “meat” to it, and though it includes some models for consumer decision-making, they’re extremely abstract and don’t seem to reflect reality very well. At first, I thought that the problem was that I didn’t understand the subject. But coincidentally, while I’ve been taking this class, I’ve been reading a book called Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions by Gary Klein. While my consumer behavior text focuses on how consumers select goods and make purchases, this book focuses on the decision-making process in general, attempting to build a model for how decisions are made (primarily under pressure) and the steps that people take to evaluate alternatives.

What’s interesting is that the two books are entirely at odds with one another. And what’s even worse is that Sources of Power seems to be much closer to the truth. I guess I could have saved myself some time and money by reading it before I enrolled in my Consumer Behavior class. But actually, it’s valuable to know the “textbook” theories of consumer behavior… because I’ll know what to expect my competitors to do down the road.
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[Business Planning] – Great New Ways of Doing Old Business

I talk a lot about publishing on this blog, but my research isn’t restricted to the publishing world alone — as a business student, I’ve had the chance to study a lot of companies in a large number of industries. In fact, one thing we get to do in business school is what are called “case studies” — we’re given a historical crossroads in a company’s life, filled in on the information leading up to a decision that needs to be made, and asked what we’d recommend using the tools we’ve learned in class. For someone like myself, who enjoys strategic planning and evaluation, it’s tremendous fun. But what often frustrates me is that my classmates are so eager to figure out the answer that the instructor is looking for that they don’t approach the problem creatively.

Sadly, this happens a lot in the business world. Managers find themselves in the unenviable role of having to appease stock owners, and they focus on the mantra of, “maximize profits, minimize costs.” This has led to a lot of bad decision-making, and it’s also led to a lot of good companies taking a plunge once they reach a point of maturity where they can no longer sustain rapid growth.

What I find most interesting, however, are companies that are able to look at old industries and find new ways to compete in them. I’m going to give three examples today of companies that have done a great job of thriving in mature markets by redefinig the way they do business. I’m also going to discuss some of the ways that an enterprising young publisher might redefine the publishing industry.

But let’s start with an example from another industry first: Build-A-Bear Workshop.

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Why WALL-E is a Success, Both Artistically And Commercially

I’ve never understood America’s love affair with summer blockbusters — year after year, the summer releases are largely made up of the most overhyped, under-ripe films Hollywood can deliver. This is particularly sad when you consider that most of the movies released in the summer are either sequels to successful films, remakes of old films, or licensed from a popular novel, TV show, video game or comic book.

The category of animated children’s films is particularly dismal, and most are barely worth remembering, let alone paying $8.50 to get in the door. Sure, every now and then you get a Shrek or a Lilo and Stitch, which is well animated and smartly written. But most of the time, studios put out films like Madagascar or Chicken Little, which are little more than a string of sight gags tacked on to a bunch of one-liners read by celebrities. Sometimes, you even get films like last year’s Meet the Robinsons, which bore the distinction of being both poorly animated and wretchedly written, despite the fact that it came from Disney, who should really know better.

I’m a big fan of animation, whether it’s CG or cel, and I hate to see the category being filled with so much dreck. The film industry treats these films like 90 minute fables that wrap sugary, forgettable jokes around a moral center that leaves a bitter aftertaste. I mean, really, how many more films can be made with the theme, “be true to yourself,” or “be nice to other people”? Do the people producing these films really think children want these moral platitudes? Is it really worth bludgeoning the audience with a lesson at the end just to appease the few soccer moms who want to be able to say, “Now didn’t that movie have a nice message?”

Since so many of these films exist, it’s almost a futile question to ask. Clearly, since so many of these movies are made, that must be what the audience wants, right?

I might have come to this conclusion had it not been for one studio that never sinks to the level of its competition (or its parent company!). This is a studio that dominates the CG half of the category, though I have no doubts that they would be equally good at cel animation if they chose to try their hand at it. This is a studio that has produced so many hits so consistently that even its weaker films are on a whole different level from the rest of the stuff out there.

This studio is Pixar, and I’m pleased to say that they’ve achieved yet another triumph with their latest film, WALL-E.

And though the film is receiving near-universal praise, it’s also receiving a lot of criticism from people who are saying that the film’s environmental overtones are too pronounced and that it has an anti-consumerism agenda.

I disagree, for reasons I’ll explain in a moment. But I’d also like to point out that if you look closer at Pixar films, you’ll discover that all of their films have something deeper to share than just a neat story…

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[Resource of the Day] – Publish or Perish, or Publish AND Perish?

Today’s article: Publish And / Or Perish
by: Brian Hibbs
via: CBR’s Tilting At Windmills column

I read Brian Hibbs’s column fairly regularly; it’s a good resource if you’d like to know more about the innerworkings of the comic book direct market.  This recent column talks about TOKYOPOP’s decline as of late. TOKYOPOP has been the darling of the manga category for a decade now, but suddenly, the company is slashing production and letting work-for-hire folks go. What gave TOKYOPOP its competitive advantage was its ability to produce books that required very little work; since the company simply localized Japanese comics for the American market, all it had to do was hire some translators and re-letter its books. TOKYOPOP did release some original material as well (including the poorly done World of WarCraft books), but the company has had most of its success rooted in localizing manga.

Hibbs discusses the fact that the bookstore market itself is nearing saturation for manga and comics (which I would say is probably true) and that the days of growth are over. TOKYOPOP is feeling the sting the most because it’s spent so much time courting the bookstore industry and trying to get preferential treatment. But since TOKYOPOP has focused on the major stores (Borders, B&N, BAM!, Amazon), if those stores face problems, it does too.

Hibbs then goes on to outline a formula for success in the comic book “direct market”:

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[Resource of the Day] – Five Things the Comic Book Industry Is Doing Right (?)

Today’s article: Comicscape: 5 Successes In Mainstream Comics
by: Kurt Amacker
via: Mania.com

A little while back, I posted a commentary on an article about the 5 things wrong with today’s comic book industry. That article promised a followup about 5 things the industry was doing right, so I thought it’d be only fair to go through them.

This article is not nearly as insightful as the previous one, so let me sum up the points with some quick paraphrasing.

1. Marvel and DC are expanding genres while they continue to produce superhero books.
2. Marvel and DC have much better writers than they used to.
3. Comics and graphic novels are generally more available than they used to be.
4. Comic book companies are creating more mature comics now that they’re basically ignoring the comics code.
5. Comics are more legitimate than they used to be, and are showing up in mainstream media a lot more than they used to.

My response to these points? Wrong, somewhat, wrong, you missed something, and definitely wrong. But let me explain why…

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[Comic Book Publishing] – How Comic Books Came to Be What They Are Today (and How It Affects A Publisher)

Thinking about publishing comic books? You might want to think again after you read this article. Comic books have a long and interesting history, and the format we read today is a result of many different choices that were made along the road.

Believe it or not, the format we use for comics today happened as much by accident as anything else. Prior to the 1930s, comics came in many different sizes, such as 7″ x 9″, 10″ x 13″, and the tabloid-sized 11″ x 17″.  But the current size, 6 ?” × 10 ¼”, traces its history back to a comic called Famous Funnies: A Carnival of Comics. Though this book is often erroneously called the first comic book (it’s not), it’s probably the first comic book that modern readers would recognize as such.

One story behind it is that a printing company called Eastern Color, Inc. was trying to find ways to keep the presses rolling during the Great Depression, and a sales manager named Harry I. Wildenberg was idly folding a newspaper broadsheet. He folded it once into the tabloid size, and then folded it again. It occurred to him that this produced a tidy little book in which newspaper strips could be printed. Another story attributes this idea to Maxwell “Charlie” Gaines, who is generally credited as the creator of the modern comic book format. Gaines happened upon some old newspapers in his mother’s attic, and started reading through the comics pages. As the story goes, he realized that people would be interested in reading reprints of these old strips, and he pitched the idea to Eastern, who’d published tabloid-sized books in the past. Gaines suggested that they fold the tabloid books in half and use a saddle-stitching binding to create a small book.

Whichever way it happened, the size of the book was a little bit larger than the modern format (reduction to the current size occurred years later), but the benefits were obvious: a smaller book allowed the publisher to cram more comics inside, and it was just as easy to produce a 64-page comic book as it was to produce a 32 page tabloid-sized book. Thus the modern comic was born. (Interestingly enough, this format an American convention; in Britain, comic books have traditionally been printed in full-size magazines.)

But the size of comic books isn’t the only thing that has its roots in industry history…

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How to Deal With Being Told That You Suck

Try your hand at anything in life, and chances are good that, before long, you’ll be told that you suck.

And most of the time, it’ll be true.

But there’s nothing wrong with sucking. Society has conditioned us to believe that we must be good at everything we do, or else we shouldn’t bother. We watch movies and television dramas where we constantly see actors and actresses behaving as if life is effortless; as if they will always triumph in any circumstance no matter how much the odds are stacked against them. We watch reality shows such as American Idol where we laugh at the silly fools who are kidding themselves, and we cheer on the folks who make pop music look easy. We love winners, and we shame losers; we make heroes out of those who triumph, whether or not they actually deserve it.

And that’s why we tell each other that we suck. And that’s also why we hate to suck. We want to believe that everything we attempt is going to turn out well. We want to believe that we’re all going to be successful because of our natural talent and abilities. We want to believe that just because we’ve worked hard at something, we’re going to be rewarded for it.

Unfortunately, that’s not how life works. The truth is that most of the time, we do suck, whether we want to admit it or not. Many parents that I’ve met suck at raising kids. Many artists that I’ve met suck at drawing. Many writers (many, many writers) that I’ve met suck at writing. Many educated people that I’ve met suck at thinking for themselves. Many churchgoing people that I’ve met suck at being genuinely nice to others.

That’s because sucking at something is the natural state of things. Being good, or even great, is something you have to work at.

But the first step is in being able to accept the fact that you do, indeed, suck.

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[Comic Book Publishing] – The Business Side of Comics

Have you ever thought about creating your own comic book?

If my experiences in the industry reflect the population as a whole, I’d guess that hundreds of thousands of people have. And many of them have actually attempted to do it, whether they’ve created an amateur book to print at Kinko’s or gone through the process of putting together a professional-quality series. Every time I go to conventions, I’m struck by how many new faces I see… and how many people I don’t see again because they’ve quietly exited the industry.

I’ve devoted quite a bit of this blog to talking about the creative side of comics through my Comic Book Writer’s Guide. But I’ve noticed that there’s a real lack of advice out there pertaining to the business side of comics. That’s partially due to the fact that most of the companies who do succeed are tight-lipped about their best practices for fear of helping out future competitors. I get that. But it’s mostly due to the fact that most comic book publishers aren’t run like businesses at all; they’re run like hobbies. Thus, there’s a lot of bad advice out there from people who really don’t know what they’re talking about.

In my 6 years in the industry, I’ve been exposed to some of the worst practices, and I’ve learned quite a bit about how not to run a comic book company. And so today, I’m going to offer a quick survey of the business side of the comic book industry… and some tips on how emerging publishers can actually survive amidst all the problems they’re going to face.

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[Resource of the Day] – 5 Things Wrong With Comic Books Today

Today’s article: Comicscape: 5 Problems With American Comics
by: Kurt Amacker
via: Mania.com

I just noticed this well-written little article today, and I think it does a great job of summarizing the problems that today’s comic book industry is facing. And though I’m going to touch on the author’s views here, I’ll be adding a full original article of my own to approach the problem from a business perspective.

The article lists five reasons why the American comic book industry is in trouble. To be fair, the article should be titled “5 Things Wrong With Marvel and DC,” but since they control 75-80% of the market in any given month, they are representative of the entire industry. The author’s five points are thus:

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