The lesson Conan O’Brien learned and Jay Leno forgot.

Somebody forgot a prime rule in business:  You can’t easily manipulate the customer.

It’s an essential notion in marketing:  that to be successful in business you offer buyers what they desire.  A close corollary is that you don’t offer something they don’t really want.  And, to be truthful, let’s agree that it probably wasn’t actually Jay or Conan themselves who need to take responsibility for the programming debacle that was proposed and what was finally agreed to, namely a down-shift in airing times for Leno’s The Jay Leno Show and Conan’s The Tonight Show. 

If you’ve been under a rock recently and don’t know, programming executives at NBC—who should have known better—decided to air Jay’s show 90 minutes earlier than its previous time of 1135pm; now, instead, it runs at 10pm and in Jay’s old time slot now runs Conan’s show.  However, there’s one little problem—Jay’s new time period isn’t working out in terms of generating the same audience—not just the same viewers, but the same number of viewers.  But Conan is doing just fine!

This is a big problem somebody should have anticipated.

And because of all of this, there’s a big problem for a lot of people.  Jay Leno’s franchise has lost a fair amount of revenue and economic value; NBC has lost a substantial number of viewers—and, thus, revenue--to competing networks and cable systems; NBC affiliates have lost viewers leading up to a “prime-time” for them, i.e., the 11pm news, and thus money to competing programs and stations.  All of this is because the boys and girls at NBC forgot the lesson every undergraduate business student learns in MARKETING 101—that television, like hotels, car rental companies, radio broadcasters, fast-food purveyors, and airlines—know already:  That virtually all “products” have their own specific “markets’ and that that pairing of products and people—what is, indeed, called “product-markets—is not easily altered, certainly not at the whim of the marketing guys. 

So what Jay Leno and NBC and the affiliates lost were all those people who used to watch—and who used to look forward to doing so—The Jay Leno Show.  Apparently they are not prepared nor do they necessarily want to see Jay Leno in the earlier time slot, so now they have defected or grown to like Conan O’Brien.  What NBC forgot was that there’s quite literally a marketplace based on time in which people expect different realities at different times…the rates to be pay for car rentals, the package of services to be delivered by a hotel, the places we expect the aircraft to fly--and the kind of television shows we want to view. 

But wait, the execs at NBC have a solution to the problem…move Jay’ program back to his old time place, cut the show in half, and push Conan O’Brien back to sometime close to his old spot—but there are still problems:  Conan likes his new franchise—and viewers, some of whom are Jay’s old viewers. 

To solve the problem now doesn’t mean simply reversing what’s already been done!

Simply put, Humpty-Dumpty probably can’t be put back together again.  Jay’s lost some of his previous viewers for good; Conan will leave NBC for greener pastures, rather than go back to the back of the bus; and many previously contented viewers have learned that they’ll be fine with however they’ve come to spend their time from 1135pm to 1230am since Jay moved away. 

Which all goes to show that the managers in any company can’t easily—if ever—really fiddle with what the market really wants--and still get by with it for very long.  The genius of marketing, some [mistakenly] believe is that it can tell buyers what to buy and they will, what they ought to prefer and they will.  It’s with that kind of management logic that leads enterprises to become, well, unsuccessful. 

Ask Jay what he thinks of execs who don’t get this powerful and first-principle in business!  Or, for that matter, Conan, who’s being asked to “move” back to where he came from.  They’ll both tell you that the marketplace they know simply doesn’t work that way. 

_______________________________________________________________

To make sure you get a "tweet" with every new blog, follow "keithmurrayblog" on Twitter!  Think others might like to read this?  Re-TWEET it to your followers with the SHARE ARTICLE tab below!