Sharpening the Sword is a regular column by retailer John Riley of Grasshopper's Comics, a 1300 square foot comic and game store in Williston Park, New York.  This week, Riley takes off on learning from the big boys. 

At the end of my last column I summarized my impressions of this year's GAMA Trade Show by stating that you had better learn to work with what you've got because there's nothing staggering on the horizon.  The day that article posted I received my copy of Comics & Games Retailer only to find a lengthy series of articles on the fallout of 2005 for the gaming end of our business.  Apparently we lost a large number of stores, a distributor, and a host of smaller companies and gaming lines, more than I was aware of.  

While the cover article chronicled the numbers and the resulting impact on the industry, the backup articles all attempted to point to the bright spots in the picture.  When we feel threatened as an industry we often like to talk about the 'strengths of the direct market', and it's true that we definitely have advantages over our big box competitors.  We can react faster, we have better product knowledge, usually have better customer service, personal relationships and a number of other competitive advantages.  But as our jobs get harder and we face more outside competition than ever I think we need to change our focus for a moment and look at what we can learn from the mass market.

Yes, I know this is heresy.  We're supposed to stand on our soapboxes and proudly proclaim our independence.  Personally, I think that Wal-Mart may be one of the worst things to ever happen to this country and a brief study of their business model immediately points to the fact that as a nation we are consuming ourselves out of our own jobs. But the mass market retailers are learning from us and fast.  They have to as they need to find new avenues for revenue growth beyond merely opening more stores as the country becomes saturated.  The direct market developed manga, but the bookstores now dominate it because they saw a niche that allowed them growth.  We pioneered quality family games and now Target is putting a gaming boutique in all their stores.  It's not that the mass market is targeting us for extermination; we're so small that we barely register on their radar.  But our products are something they might be interested in.

So it's time we learned from them.  Because honestly, there are just a lot of things they do better than we do. 

First of all, let's look at the term 'mass market.'  Now think about the most prosperous times in our industry.  For comics it was the early nineties when everyone and their brother was reading for a while.  For games it was the introduction of Magic and then Pokemon.  What do these events have in common?  We were selling to the mass market, the general audience, the mainstream of America who until that point had passed by your store every day oblivious to your existence.  Those events were a taste of what it's like to reach beyond our tiny audience into the mainstream.  When we say, 'We'll never see another Pokemon,' what we really mean is that we'll never experience selling to the mass market again.  We'll never have that product that actually dragged the general public in our doors.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately.  I have a 'variety store' next to me that sells generic toys, paper towels, holiday stuff, etc...  It's very small, very cramped and just filled up with stuff.  It doesn't really have a theme and there's so much stuff jammed in the window that you can't make any of it out.  And yet I see parents bringing their kids into it all day long.  I consider my store to be very clean, bright, attractive and friendly.  Yet I also hear these parents drag these same children past my store without allowing them to come inside.  I couldn't figure out why.  Why do we apparently need a particular product to almost force people to come in and experience our world? 

Because our stores don't speak the language of the mass market.  Mass market stores clearly say, 'We have everything you're looking for in your normal life neatly organized and cheap.'  Our stores say, 'This is our world; if you bother to enter it we'll be nice to you.'  We speak a different language.

For the most part our windows are full of posters that say, 'Don't come in here unless you already like comics,' or 'Games that only people with pocket protectors would play sold here.'   Is that an exaggeration?  Maybe it is to us, but how does the general public perceive your store? 

For example, say you're a music fan and you pass a new music store and the store's entire window is full of posters for underground punk bands.  If you're a fan of that you'll go in.  But if you're not, your belief will be that that store speaks the language of 'punk' and you'll pass it by, even though you like music.  The store communicates to you that there is nothing in there that you'd be interested in.  So if you're not already a fan of comics, why would a poster of Wolverine's bloody claws motivate you to come in and browse?

The same holds true for gaming.  If your windows are full of posters for games that even you have trouble pronouncing what message can that possibly send to the general public?  Let's take that same music store.  Now put posters in the window that are apparently all for German metal bands, all in German.  Are you going inside?  Do you really expect a mother walking past your window full of posters for the newest book in some Elven Fantasy setting to come into your store?

This may sound petty and obvious, but it's not.  It's not that the posters themselves don't work (although they don't).  It's that they are the first and possibly most important example of communicating to the general public that we in fact do not speak their language.  And if we don't speak the same language as them, how can we possibly hope to succeed?

We've got great stuff in our stores and it's time we learned some things from the mass market on how to sell it.   Next time, the Rule of Familiarity and 80/20 at work.