How can you sell high priced research services when there’s so much free and low cost information flooding the internet? One way is to take a page out of Mike Bloomberg’s playbook. At Seeking Alpha, Felix Salmon spotlights the Bloomberg approach (it’s a riff on a Paul Kedrosky-Jim Cramer webcast).
In his (and Cramer’s) eyes, the genius is in how Bloomberg goes about “being more client-focused and responsive and invaluable.”
It’s fair to say that most industry analyst companies believe they are already all that — client focused, responsive, invaluable. I’m not disagreeing. The challenge is that those attributes are moving targets. And, they’re moving faster and faster all the time.
Yet, the analyst business has been fairly staid. (Feel free to disagree with me.) Most industry analyst firms demonstrate responsiveness, for example, by making periodic changes to their research coverage areas and eventually reflect some of those changes in their events and speaking gigs. The underlying assumption was that new topics should slip seamlessly into an existing structure of research products and consulting services. This could be represented as:
new information + existing client-facing deliverables = research product
By contrast, Salmon highlights the Bloomberg approach:
new information + new client-facing functions + rapid deployment = research product
Applying Bloomberg’s approach doesn’t mean adopting custom keyboards. It does mean rethinking the role of base research, publishing platforms, pricing, Ts&Cs, and more.
Food for thought.
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