http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123335678420235003.html

“The Economics of Giving It Away”

Of course, this means doing a lot of different little things, which you mention at several places.

The newspaper brand is still powerful. If publishers deploy it into several worthwhile niche products (with good margins), they can make money and build on that brand at the same time. (Every niche product should carry some news and information coming from the newspaper.)

This is the concept behind our marketing Wuduplz.com to newspapers: Help a worthwhile niche in its marketing by offering a unique message, then link news to it at the same time.

Excellent article.

There’s an outstanding article that ran in the Harvard Business Review called the Sales Learning Curve by Mark Leslie and Charles Holloway that should be required reading for anyone introducing new products. I put the link in the website box so click on my name to go the summary of the article on HBR and where you can get a download.

I can say unequivocally that it is one of the most thought provoking articles I’ve read in the sales arena.

With the digital product still being a much harder ‘sell’, a newspaper’s commission system must be tweaked otherwise there is a built in disincentive to promote the digital product. At this stage in our revolution, the effort-to-compensation ratio is disproportionately in favor of print, especially for long-standing print reps.

It is no different than the situation faced by journalists; a fundamental shift in the nature of a sales rep’s role and the trepidation that comes along with that shift. We need to ease them through the change with effective training along with changes to the way in which they are compensated.

@SteveatLFPress