Walmart and Amazon Duke It Out With Dead Trees

The current Walmart vs. Amazon.com battle of the bestseller books points out one of the oldest marketing problems of all: Confusing the package with the product, the medium with the message, the benefit with the feature.

In 1992, back in the Stone Age of the Internet, a now-famous New York Times article declared “The End of Books,” discussing how hypertext threatened to make the traditional novel obsolete. Then in 2007, an article in the Huffington Post bemoaned the fate of books, quoting an Associated Press-Ipsos poll that showed that one in four adults had not read one single book in the past year.

And now it’s 2009, and we’re watching two of the largest and most successful retailers on the planet launching a marketing war against each other. Their weapons: Music downloads? DVDs? Video games?

Books are back.
No, books. And not e-books or recordings of books, but the old-fashioned kind of books made out of actual dead trees.

On one hand we have a supposedly soon-to-be-obsolete medium making a big comeback in the retailing business. On the other hand, we have the book business predicting the end of the world.

A reasonable response to all this would be something like Mark Twain’s, after a newspaper had reported his death some 12 years before he actually died. He said: “Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” But the book business – authors, publishers and independent book stores – are responding with complaints that:
•    Independent book stores will struggle as they become outlets only for lower volume, less successful books.
•    Publishers will be more reluctant to take risks on books that don’t fit the bestseller model.
•    And authors will be discouraged because they’ll be paid less, or not publish at all.

They may be right. But they’re also missing the point, because they’re confusing the package – paper that is folded, cut, fastened together and covered with a more colorful piece of paper – with the product: The entertainment and information that people have always wanted.

The enduring importance of stories.
Long, long before there were books, or printing presses or even writing, all stories were oral renditions from memory.  The storyteller was a valued member of society, satisfying the demand for a good story well told. A successful storyteller’s most important marketing principles were to remember the whole story verbatim (think of Homer memorizing and reciting all 28,000 lines of the Iliad and the Odyssey), and to present it dramatically and convincingly.

Then along came writing, and the printing press and mass-produced books. And no doubt storytellers complained because their remarkable memories had become obsolete, that they were reduced to telling only less popular stories, and that they weren’t being paid as well.

That’s the position the book business is in today. Blackberries, e-book readers and video on demand may or may not replace traditional books.  But authors, publishers and retailers will continue to thrive if they remember that what they’re selling is a story, not a dead tree, and that stories will never become obsolete.

Tags: Amazon.com, bestsellers, book stores, books, price war, Walmart

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009 at 12:52 pm and is filed under Fred Petrick, Marketing Communications. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.