Some companies get it--some don't

Here are three companies and I'm wondering if you can guess which two understand their customers and how to reward their patronage:
1. Borders
2. Barnes & Noble
3. Amazon

If you buy books my bet is you can guess right away. Two of these companies offer great rewards. Amazon is almost always 20% cheaper than the other two companies without any rewards. Borders simply asks for your email address and they discount close to, if not even to, Amazon. And yes, Amazon gets all your information after you purchase.

But not Barnes & Noble. They want $25 or they won't reward you at all.

Barnes & Noble doesn't understand that keeping pace is about satisfying the customer not just their bottom line. Rewarding a customer for being loyal should trump all other marketing ploys. Hopefully they'll get it before its too late.

Extra credit: If I was a marketing person at either of these book companies I'd make a deal with Ebay/Half.com. I'd allow customers to bring their used books to any of my stores and we'd buy them. Then we'd take those books and post them on Half.com. The math is easy: pay x dollars for used books and sell them for y dollars. The best part is that because Half.com sells so many books its easy to get the market rate instantly. At the same time Half.com could list new books we have in our inventory.

I read the news today oh boy...

Why are newspapers going out of business? Because they always seem to be years behind everyone else.

If I ran one of the major newspaper companies like New York Times, Hearst, McClatchey, MediaNews Group, Lee, etc. I wouldn't operate out of fear or be reactive--I'd be proactive. At this point what do newspapers have to lose? They are already losing.

There are no instant fixes for newspapers but here are a few thoughts:

1. Newspapers won't print on paper forever. Why aren't these newspaper companies coming together and investing in companies like Amazon, which owns the Kindle, or investing in epaper? It would save them billions of dollars a year by not printing on paper and the cost of investing in this future technology wouldn't cost anywhere near that. Even better, give the new epaper product to current and future subscribers. You'd still be saving money as a collection of papers and probably find the one thing newspapers can't find now: new subscribers. Just sign them up for a 3 year subscription in return they get the epaper reader.

2. Why do newspapers concede ownership of news aggregation to the likes of Yahoo, Google, MSN, AOL, Digg, etc? I'd create a newspaper coalition and buy or build a portal property and become the owner of my own destiny rather than hoping that your story gets picked up and you get Dugg. Within that newspaper portal I'd create the best news search engine.

3. Build better classifieds. Video, audio, and more. Craigslist is the minimalist's answer to classifieds so make them better. Not just better, make them great. Then, print the classifieds. Craig can't do that.

4. Create a newspaper site that allows the users to build their own section. If I like crafts then let me build a crafts section. Even more niche would be a sewing section under crafts. Let the user build the section and we'll filter the stories from around the world of interest to people who sew. It's not impossible to build niche sections--Ebay does it. Newspapers need to stop deciding what people want and let them show us.