UnSelling: The New Customer Experience

Chapter 37Netflix versus Blockbuster

Businesses fail all the time. I've had a few myself and watched many others. Just about every entrepreneur I know has left one behind. The hardest ones fail slowly, leaving us with some kind of hope that if we'd just tried this or that things would have been different. Ideally, we close up shop with some new lessons learned, only slightly banged up and ready to start again.

When large companies fail, and we certainly have seen some doozies in the past few years, we sit like armchair quarterbacks and make our calls on just what did them in. Of course, if we'd been in charge, we would have seen that whole digital photography thing taking over, right? At times like those, I am thankful to have had my failures quietly and not in the headlines of every newspaper and blog.

The opinions seem to be especially loud when it's a brand we grew up with, was especially successful, or was something that was part of our common experiences. The bigger they are, the harder they fall, right?

Growing up, Friday nights meant wandering the aisles of Blockbuster to pick out a movie—quietly judging other people's choices and hoping you'd remembered your membership card. The kid working behind the counter had seen every movie. The board in the back let you know when The Crow would finally be out on video.

Finding a Blockbuster case in the back of your locker at the end of the year and realizing Monty Python and the Holy Grail was 9 weeks late…the horror.

So, what ...