Grasping at Straw Dogs

I blame it on the street bums, they keep drinking all the liquor! Seriously though, you bring up a good point, why don't these companies analyze the problem and find the real cause instead of making a scapegoat of something else? Or...better yet, do what a smart company would do and find the problem and use it as a benifit. That's what the record companies should have done and thats what Steve jobs recognized.

There is a direct correlation between the amount of people with SMS enabled cell phones who saw Gigli and said movie's poor ticket sales. It's true - J.Lo told me so.

God forbid they might actually have to start producing great movies in Hollywood. Would they even know how make a great movie, that's what really worries the industry folks.

As a business person, if I provide a bad product or service, I won't have customers / clients. Why does Hollywood and the music industry believe that this rule does not apply to their wares. The problem is not technology, but rather a bad product.

I think you're missing the point, as was the tone of the article. They're not saying that text messaging is ruining the box office performance of a movie regardless of quality. What they're saying is that technology is speeding up the word-of-mouth to the point that they no longer have the benefit of selling tickets to an uninformed public. Hollywood has bad products just as they have some very good products. All companies have some A-line and some B-line products, and we all face a challenge in recovering our investment in the B-line. The movie industry and some of the rest of us use promotion and remarketing techniques to sell less-than-perfect products. Their clinkers and their promotions are far more evident to all of us than most other mediocre products. That they've lost an advantage of selling off their B-grade products, which we can only hope forces them to make a better movie the first time around. In the end though, they're just dealing with a lost marketing opportunity for their B-grade products, just as we all must do from time to time.

Heath is absolutely correct in his assessment of the impact of word of mouth on sales of virtually anything that is being discussed. It is for this very reason that the movie industry's argument falls short. If, in fact, text messaging has such an impact, it should work both ways, right? Does that mean that higher than average opening weekends are also a product of text messaging? According to the logic used to form the excuse for poor sales, it does. The same logic also provides the answer to Heath's question. It all comes back to the need to put out a great product. If the product is great, the word of mouth buzz can increase sales. Unfortunately, the movie and music industries are stuck in their old mentalities and are threatened by losing control of their target audiences. This is the same type of thinking that delayed widespread deployment of DVD technologies for years while the industry tried to agree on a standard (and control.) My personal favorite excuse is the economy. If customers' budgets are tight, that tells me I have to add value in a way that is quantifiable in terms of cost savings or incremental revenue to earn their business. It's a little more work than whining, but it can be done...