COMMENT: It was the best of times…

…It was the worst of times. Depending on who you talk to, that is. Either the internet is killing your business or helping it reach customers way outside your catchment area. 

I was struck by the contrast in the two stories on our daily today. On the one hand we have yet another UK store shutting its doors, pointing the finger at online competition (and rising rents, it should be also be said) and on the other we have a business that has grasped the nettle, embraced the possibilities of online and is using it to turn its business from a local concern into a nationwide dealership. Sadly, Millennium Music in Cheltenham has been forced to close after 20 years in business while Banbury’s One Man Band is doing rather brilliantly, using the power of digital media to drive keyboard sales. 

For me, it highlights the gulf that sometimes exists in the MI market between businesses that are just plain baffled by the whole notion of online sales and marketing and those who are able to realise its potential for their business. For a while now, I have thought that quite a lot of the store closures in MI were part of a process of natural selection brought to bear by the arrival of the digital age. Analogue stores are the ones falling by the wayside while those that see, and are equipped to maximise, the potential of online selling are surviving and, in a lot of cases, thriving in ways they might never originally have envisioned. 

The tragedy of the many stores that are going to the wall blaming internet competition is that it doesn’t have to be hugely expensive or complicated to achieve results. It isn’t necessary to listen to someone claiming to be a digital media expert (let alone pay them) to get good at it. Most kids from age 15 and up are already online media experts. Just talk to one. Essentially, all the two guys from One Man Band have done is made some videos talking about keyboards and stuck it up on their site. They’ve done it very well, but it’s by no means rocket science. The results, however, have been transformative for their business.

MI’s problem has always been that quite a lot of stores are owned, managed and staffed by passionate people who are musicians first and business people second. Sometimes a very distant second. It’s a shame to be losing their expertise. But no-one said progress (if progress is what it is) had to be fair. In fact, it rarely is.