#010 RANT – Old School is Dead School
Mail order catalogues are dead...really.

Published on May 21, 2018

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Mark has recently had a client who refused to conduct a business-wide digital transformation and ended going into voluntary administration. Aside from the pain of having to watch good people getting laid off, he is also in therapy over the sheer wasted opportunity.

Chris is there to help him through it with a massive rant and if nothing else, they got to talk through the issues.

Good solid legacy

This was a solid, nation-wide, legacy mail-order catalogue business that had every chance of staking out a large chunk of the online retail sales market – if only…

If only they’d undergone a root and branch, search, content, social and e-commerce digital transformation. Forging ahead into new markets and catered to new digital-savvy audiences (like everyone else). Instead, they steadfastly held to old paradigms and legacy customer interactions (e.g. print ads with order forms that customers have to fill out and mail in). Probably from fear of losing the dwindling sales from that group.

Digital transformation isn’t easy

Granted that any whole-of-business transformation is a bold and high-risk move. It takes decisive leadership with strong charisma, vision and conviction to steer any business through this kind of change. With no guarantee of success. However, the alternative is either to end up being irrelevant, at best or bankrupt, at worse.

Further fallout

The people that worked there in middle management, were very good at what they did. This was simply a failure of leadership. Or more to the point, a lack of leadership and the employees paid the price through no real fault of their own.

And in the end, what was full of potential was no more.

*Sigh*

PS No, we won’t name names. That wouldn’t be very nice.

PPS One simple digital “must-have” for smaller businesses is a mobile responsive website. Check out our episode on the Mobile Web to understand some of the ramifications of not being mobile forward in this day and age.

Note: A lot of Australian businesses are finding it hard to undergo root and branch digital transformations. There are publicly traded, blue-chip entities that have the talent to innovate but are unable to do so successfully. Mostly due to system-wide, structural flaws in upper management and shareholder culture.