Here’s the latest myth among some people following the cable industry.
Cable-cutting millennials will come reconnect when they have kids, because they want good programming.
‘We think behaviors could change once the so-called millennials start having families,’ the New York Times quoted Glenn B. Enoch, senior vice president for audience insights at the Nielsen ratings service.
Excuse me while I fall over laughing. Once they have children, it’s all going to change? Our Netflix account has a child sign-in option where hundreds of shows—all represented by popular character icons for the pre-reader—can be accessed with one click.
We have certainly found its selection more than sufficient. And I am not sure we really want them watching more TV anyway.
But the lesson for cable companies, book publishers, and all other media owners, is this: The key to understanding your future customer is that we are past the point of ‘cord cutters’ now.
We are at the point of ‘cord-nevers.’
These nevers, whether the cord is old-school cable, old-school movie making or old-school book publishing, all have one thing in common: they are not giving up on an old model in favour of a new one. They are so used to the new way that the old way is the alternative you have to sell them on. It is a fundamental paradigm shift.
Never mind television; how are you going to get these future customers to buy into a publishing model where a book they want to read might be unavailable to them simply on the basis of the country they live in? Or a world where the gatekeeper-produced book costs four times as much as the self-published book their peers have made?
How are you going to convince them to uphold a ‘life plus 70’ copyright rule to protect already-dated intellectual property in a world where information is so freely available that there simply isn’t time to consume it all?
It’s important to cater to today’s customer, but don’t forget tomorrow’s.
And tomorrow’s customer is not going to understands the old way yet chooses the new one. Instead this person won’t comprehend the old way at all, and having grown up in a world where the new way is the status quo. What media are you going to get this customer to pay for?
Some cable companies report success luring the cutters back, and maybe this will happen for a while, but the real challenge will be, How to serve the nevers?
Image credit: Here.
Fallacious statement: ” because they want good programming.” If there were good programming I might agree. There is not and hasn’t been for a long time. The only thing from my kids cutting the cable (and three of seven have) is sports. We cut the cable a long time ago and haven’t noticed it was gone.