What's it all about, anyway?

Welcome to Moving Tribes

Why a newsletter, and why now?

2012 was the year I learned a lot. Ok, I’d probably picked up some nuggets of knowledge in the 43 years prior to that, but in 2012 I learned a lot about retailing, a lot about running a business and a lot about myself.

Entering 2012, I was 18 months into running Game Group - the second largest specialist retailer of video games in the world, operating in 9 countries and based in the UK. Now that should have been great fun, and much of it was - as a lifelong gamer, what’s not to like about being surrounded by games and game-loving colleagues all day?

But there was a problem. Game, like many other retailers of the time, had failed to change as fast as its consumers. The business had under-invested in e-commerce and digital technologies, had largely ignored the growth of digitally delivered and mobile-based gaming, was being massively undercut by huge supermarkets using games as loss-leaders and had spectacularly, unbelievably, mind-bogglingly too many stores (more than 700 in a UK market that could probably support 2-300 max).

So this had always been something of a turnaround project, but by 2012 something unexpected had led to our plans coming badly unstuck. The giants of the gaming industry (Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo) had simply taken a few years longer than anyone expected to bring out their new generation consoles. Without the lure of the new, the games market was stagnating and our inflated cost base was becoming more and more of a problem.

There’s a lot more to the story, of course, but the ending remains the obvious one - in March of 2012 after months of late-nights and all-day meetings with bankers we had to put the business into administration, essentially handing it to the banks, who promptly ripped it apart, allowed much of it to die and sold off what they could to the highest bidder. Hundreds of people lost their jobs and for all of us involved the experience was deeply scarring.

Looking back now, though, what really sticks with me about the whole experience is that it should have been avoidable. The changes the business should have made over the 5 or so years before it went under were fairly obvious, and not even that difficult to execute. And yet, despite having lots of dedicated and well-intentioned people in the management team, we had failed to evolve fast enough. And as I looked at other retail casualties, the same thing seemed to be true - administrations, bankruptcies and fire-sales all looked like they could have been avoided.

So why did it look so easy to prescribe a winning strategy for a business from the outside, when it seemed so hard for the management team inside the walls to spot the same thing? Why did even those businesses which did articulate a change programme so often fail to deliver it quickly or dramatically enough for it to make a difference? Why did so many great retail and hospitality brands effectively die rather than evolve?

I’ve made it my mission in the years since 2012 to try to find out. I’ve watched, learned and talked to really smart people about this process of reinventing businesses. I’ve also done it a couple of times since then myself, with gratifyingly better results than at Game.

And I’ve written about all of that too. In long form in my 2 books, Reinventing Retail and The Average is Always Wrong and in countless shorter posts on LinkedIn and Twitter.

And that’s why we are here. Social media posts are fine, and I’ve been grateful for the support, comment, input and sharing/retweeting that I’ve had over the years from many terrific people who have added to my knowledge immeasurably. But I itch to explore this important topic in more depth that social media allows, and in a more interactive way than you get by writing a book.

That’s the purpose of this newsletter. Welcome to Moving Tribes.

Why “Moving Tribes”?

Great consumer businesses get people to do something. To subscribe, to buy, to revisit, to join. And so it turns out that a big part of reinventing a consumer business comes from firstly understanding who your tribe of customers are, and then inspiring them to act.

Hence Moving Tribes, which has been my personal consulting brand for nearly 15 years. If you are interested, you can see more about me and my work at the original site, www.movingtribes.com

What’s the plan?

On a weekly basis, I will post here (and to your inbox as a subscriber) posts on a whole variety of topics related to how retail, hospitality and other consumer businesses can thrive in the modern economy, and avoid the fate that awaits those who do not change.

We’ll talk about business and marketing strategy, about leadership and people, about financing and ownership, about data and analytics and more. Some of those posts will be stand-alone, but others will join together like an old-fashioned part-work. (I have a multi-part series planned on the big consumer trends that will change the market over the next few years, for example).

As the posts gather, I hope the site will end up as a sort of Wikipedia or encyclopedia of consumer business strategies. I will know it is working when it becomes not just something interesting to read on the commute, but somewhere to come back to, to think about and to talk about with your peers and your teams.

And also, somewhere to contribute. I’ve learned enormously from the interactions I’ve had on social media on these topics, and I’d love to build a community here that can do the same. I’d love you to subscribe, to comment on articles, to email me with your thoughts or suggestions. Over time, we’ll add chat functionality to Moving Tribes and try to really build the community aspect so that we all learn from each other.

What happens next?

My intention is to post a new article weekly, usually on a Tuesday or Wednesday morning. I’ll inevitably end up also posting smaller pieces responding to big news stories that are relevant to our topic, but I’ll try to not to do that too frequently, for fear of becoming an in-box pest.

Substack offers the option for some or all of a newsletter to be paid for. At this point, my intention is that this weekly heartbeat of posts remains free. Over time, though, I may look to add a layer of additional and paid-for services for those who want them, including more bespoke interaction and even personal consulting, advice and mentoring. That’s all in the future, though.

For now, subscribe, for free, and join in!

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