In his book, Trade-Off: Why Some Things Catch On, and Others Don’t, (affiliate link) Kevin Maney examines the importance of being either exceptionally convenient or exceptionally high fidelity if you hope to resonate with consumers.  If you’re somewhere in the middle, look out.  You’ll get clobbered by one end or the other.  As a marketer it’s important to evaluate your product and see where, on that continuum, you fall.  And if you’re in the middle you need a product plan to get the hell out of there or suffer the consequences.

Maney got this idea from Netflix CEO Reed Hastings who saw that consumers would trade ultimate convenience for less quality, and vice versa; but were unwilling to settle for the middle ground. To continue this example, Netflix is the ultimate in convenience, movies are mailed to you or streamed right to your TV. You don’t go anywhere, they come to you.  On the other end is IMAX, stadium seating movie theaters.  This is inconvenient.  Movies play at prescribed times that you have to plan for, you need to drive to get there, and you pay an exceptional premium for the privilege.

But guess what?  Both parts of the industry are thriving.  The super-high end and the super-low end.

Guess what’s getting killed?  You guessed it.  The middle.  The Blockbuster Video and Hollywood Videos of the world.  Things that are a little more convenient than the theatres – you can take one of many movies home with you – but not so convenient – you still have to drive there and back – and it’s not so much better than watching a movie on HBO in terms of fidelity.  This middle ground is what is killing Blockbuster.

The recipe for failure today? A little convenience,  a little fidelity.  The market no longer has room for moderation when it comes to new products and services.

So what can you do to move your product one way or the other?  That answer may be the difference in making your product or company a success or making it one that we wonder what happened to it.