The (sometimes) painful birth of innovation
- Jan 09, 2009
In this piece Mark Mangan, CEO of Flavorpill, follows on from Richard's and his Virgin colleagues' posts on Business Stripped Bare, and shares his experience in branding and innovation.
A few months back, as Wall Street began to implode, online advertising was getting hit along with everyone else, and soon our company was in near crisis mode. Everything was on the table, and all the email publications we'd been creating for years were now in question – what was making money, every month, and what wasn't? It became clear that, regardless of economic troubles, things had to change: we had to innovate in a big way.
We had already begun looking for some capital or partnerships to shore up our position and as the crisis began to freak people out, some of the responses were bleak, including one from a money man who asked, "Why not just give up? You've been at it for so long now."
We've been around for almost eight years now, but we see that as an advantage, slow boiling a brand with integrity. Give up? Not really sure what that means or why we would do it. Particularly as we had newfound momentum on the rise, even if it wasn't so apparent in the monthly P&L.
In Flavorpill we've built a pretty amazing brand which stands for quality, creativity, passion and discovery. We write cultural event previews in five cities, as well as features, interviews, and recommendations of artists, books, films, and music across four other successful subbrand publications: Artkrush, Boldtype, Earplug, and Activate (which cover art, books, music, and world news). We get a pretty solid stream of lovely feedback from our readers, as we only write about what we love, and we work damned hard to check our sources and get our fans the goods.
The nature of development and evolution can be, admittedly, sometimes a bit frustrating. It's like a video game. You push and drive and struggle, only to break through to a new level where you're again flat, the past means nothing. Time to innovate, start over. Just a few months back when things weren't as tough, people would say wow, look at this huge media empire you've built. We didn't focus so much on self congratulations... oh yeah, we built that. It's always about the next peak.
As the heavy clouds rolled in, we looked at all options. Which were seemingly none. We'd been there before, staring in the face of a big ominous wall which says none shall pass. This time, a sizeable monthly nut and slowing ad revenue. With no action, we were going down. And with that realization, we considered the unthinkable: shutting down or selling our beloved culture pubs, our subbrands.
They were fantastic brands and pretty good businesses, but they were too heavy, and as separate brands, they required extra, specific attention and love. It was as if we had five children instead of one. They all had to be fundamentally reinvented, or let go in favor of something new – faster, lighter.
My cofounder and I delierated a bit, then both found ourselves referencing a powerful chapter in Branson's history (we were both affected by his first biography - Losing My Virginity, which we each read the year of founding our company), when he gave up his crown jewel of Virgin music to launch an untested new business, Virgin Atlantic. A massive feat of letting go to expand. If he can give up everything, we can open our minds to this. The key is whether it's the right move.
The unthinkable idea ultimately evolved into the consolidation of the pubs into a single, lightweight, daily email, under the name Flavorpill, which gives people a quick recommendation every day, across all our cultural genres: music, film, books, etc. With one deliberate stroke, we consolidated four workflows, four teams, four schedules, and four products to sell into a single, easy-to-understand, easier-to-sell product which costs a tenth to produce and generates three times as much ad revenue and becomes our largest distribution by double.
The Flavorpill Daily Dose launched in beta a couple weeks ago, and goes live to the world January 21. And, after putting our beloved culture brands on hiatus, we received several offers to buy them, which will allow them not only to be reinvented but also help finance our continued growth. But even when their fate was more uncertain we did know one thing: this is the right move, regardless of how we got here.
And once we get to the top of this, it's onto another, bigger, more challenging peak. Hopefully it won't take Mother Hardship to spur the birth of our next innovation.
