Yesterday, I spoke with some publisher friends about the possibility of changing fulfillment companies. I’ve done that a few times. I’ve also had a root canal. The root canal was more fun.
Fulfillment in the publishing world is enormously complicated. People outside of publishing don’t get it. You’re just maintaining a subscription and sending something in the mail, right?
No. Subscription management is very complicated. It includes (just for starters) order processing, renewals, seasonal address changes, gift subscriptions, digital access, customer service, and reporting on all of that.
Over the past few decades — prompted by a laudible desire to accommodate strange subscriber requests, save an extra dime on subscription costs, or to increase revenue with interesting special offers — clever marketers and circulation professionals have found ways to make it even more complicated.
“We’ve found that if we make a different offer to subscribing and non-subscribing donors, we increase our gift revenue by 3 percent!”
That’s great. (And I mean that sincerely.) That kind of thinking is how supply chains are improved and processes are optimized. But you have to ask whether the cost of the complexity overwhelms the benefit. Or, as the hip people say, is the juice worth the squeeze?
It may be, or it may not. Your 3 percent increase in gift revenue might require you to stick with a fulfillment vendor who’s 30 percent more expensive.
Learning from the iPad Revolution
Back when the iPad was first making waves, many people in the magazine industry thought print was going to die and everybody would be reading magazines on these new fancy tablet thingies. (After riding their Segways to work, I think.) Many publishers were in a mad rush to convert their magazines so they could be read in various tablet apps. Unfortunately, that meant accepting Apple’s terms and conditions, which were not favorable to publishers. (What a surprise!)
I spent a lot of time investigating all this. I concluded that it was a bad deal for publishers, but along the way I also reflected on the arrogance of those 20-something programmers at Apple and Amazon who thought they knew how to do magazine fulfillment.
It was amazing how many things they missed. Did they even talk to any subscription professionals, or did they just think (as many people thought back then) that everything was changing, it’s a digital world now, and we don’t need any of that “old-school thinking.”
Enter Krehbiel’s Razor
At first, I thought they just didn’t understand how magazine fulfillment worked. But then I realized: Maybe they understood it, and rejected it.
You’ve heard of Occam’s razor, which says you should prefer the simpler explanation. You might also know Hanlon’s razor, which says never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity or incompetence. But do you know Krehbiel’s razor — which I learned while investigating all this Apple / app stuff.
Never attribute to malice, stupidity, arrogance, or incompetence what can be explained by a different point of view.
Of course the guys at Apple and Amazon spoke to circulation professionals, and of course they knew they were radically simplifying things. That was the plan.
I suspect they took a long look at the mess of modern magazine fulfillment, ran off to calm their nerves with a stiff drink, then decided to strip it down to the essentials.
A Case for Radical Simplification
Fulfillment is a mad and wondrous thing. It reminds me of The Marvelous Toy by Tom Paxton.
It went “zip” when it moved and “bop” when it stopped,
And “whirr” when it stood still.
I never knew just what it was and I guess I never will
I’ve created an outline of fulfillment services as a starting point for my clients to document exactly what they need and how they need it done. If you’d like a copy, let me know.
You might need all those zips and bops. Then again, you might not.
If you’re a publishing company considering changing fulfillment providers, take a step back and ask: Are we making this harder than it needs to be?
Many publishers, especially those with legacy systems, tend to replicate old processes when moving to a new fulfillment provider. Consider this: instead of just replacing one set of headaches with another, ask if radical simplification is possible.
- Do you really need all the layers of customization and segmentation you’ve built up over the years?
- Can you streamline your renewal process to make it easier for subscribers to stay on board?
- Are you adding unnecessary friction to the purchasing process with outdated business rules?
- Would a simplified model improve customer retention and reduce costs?
The irony is that tech companies, often seen as the disruptors, might have gotten this one right. They didn’t try to replicate old fulfillment models. They reimagined them. Perhaps it’s time for publishers to do the same.
Need Help? Let’s Talk
If you’re navigating the chaos of changing fulfillment providers, I can help you cut through the complexity and make the process smoother. Whether you want to simplify radically or just avoid common pitfalls, let’s chat.
