Man, I’ve heard that phrase a lot in my life. And truth be told, I’ve spoken it more than I care to admit.

But when something fails once in the past (or even more than once) should it be doomed forever?

I was lucky enough to hear futurist Bob Johansen speak last week at Resource Interactive’s excellent iCitizen conference, and he said something that really stuck with me:

“Almost nothing that happens in the future is new; it’s almost always something that has been tried and failed in the past.”

It’s so true. Think about Apple’s recent successes. MP3 players floundered before the iPod came along. Smartphones existed in limited fashion before the iPhone changed the landscape. And tablet computers had been an unrealized dream for quite some time. In discussing the tablet computer in 2001, Bill Gates famously said that “within five years I predict it will be the most popular form of PC sold in America.” When that didn’t happen, it wasn’t hard to find people predicting the tablet’s failure: “The Tablet? It isn’t RIP. But it’s certainly never going to be the noise Bill Gates thought.” But then along came the iPad and its million units sold in the first month alone. And don’t get me started on e-books, which many loudly proclaimed were bound to fail. Jeff Bezos begs to differ.

We humans have this tendency to throw the baby out with the bathwater when something fails.

But the reality is that the success of any new idea — be it a product, a promotional idea, a merchandising technique, a sales tactic or website functionality –  is dependent on many different variables. Execution matters a lot. But we’re also dependent on many other situational contexts in the idea’s ecosystem, like timing, audience/customers, design, the economy, and the general randomness of life. Even slight tweaks to any of those variables can be the difference between success and failure.

In the others words, we shouldn’t automatically assume a past failure of an idea means the idea was bad. To be clear, I’m not suggesting there aren’t bad ideas that deserve to remain in the trash heap. However, we should at least break down the failure of an idea that we must have considered worthy at one point. (Why else would we have tried it in the first place?) What went wrong and what went right? Was it the execution? The positioning? The audience? Did we even have enough data points in our measurement that our findings of failure are statistically significant? Did it really fail?

Once we’ve broken the failure of the idea down into its component parts, we’ll have a better sense of whether or not the idea itself was at fault. We’ll have a much better understanding of the problems we would face if we tried it again, and that better understanding will give us a better platform from which to base our next attempt if we so desire.  We’ve all heard the stories of Thomas Edison’s thousands of failures before he finally got the incandescent light bulb right. Would we all be in the dark today if he gave up?

What do you think? Have you good ideas junked because of past failures? Was it the idea or something else?

But here’s the thing: many of Amazon’s advantages are shared by e-commerce operations of all
types, but Amazon seems to be quicker to recognize and capitalize on
those advantages than everyone else.

This morning, I pulled up the Amazon home page and was greeted by yet
another letter from Jeff Bezos announcing Amazon’s latest brilliant
innovation. This time, it’s “Frustration Free Packaging” – just in time
for the holiday season when those of us who are parents still haven’t healed the scars from last year’s unbelievable frustration with trying to release our kids’ new toys from wicked constraints that would have defied Houdini (all while the kids are jumping up and down with excitement to play with the new toys).

The secure packaging we’ve been fighting with is designed for physical stores to allow for attractive displays while at the the same time preventing theft. You can see all gory details in this patent filing for toy packaging. But the need for that type of packing in an e-commerce warehouse is moot. So, why not push manufacturers for “e-commerce packaging” that is designed to protect items in shipping but allows for easy removal from the package? Amazon’s size probably gives them an advantage in pushing for this type of action from manufacturers, but many of today’s biggest multi-channel retailers certainly have massive pull with manufacturers and probably could have pulled this type of thing off either individually or collectively — had they thought of it.

And, of course, Amazon has been the trailblazer for many of today’s e-commerce innovations, including customer reviews, affiliate programs and recommendations. So, you might say, let them bear the costs of the innovations and we’ll just capitalize on them after Amazon has proven the way.

While that strategy may work sometimes, it’s fraught with risk because Amazon doesn’t often relinquish market share once they’ve gained it (particularly if they hook customers into Amazon Prime), and they tend to gain that market share during the holiday season. Check out their quarterly results in the “North American Media” category over the last 22 quarters in comparison to Barnes and Noble and Borders:

You can see it’s the fourth quarter where they gain market share. They don’t gain much in the other three quarters, but they certainly hold on to a lot of the share they gained the prior holiday season.

So, what can the rest of us do about it?

For starters, we might want to put innovation on the front burner. Yes, there are costs and risks associated with innovation. But the costs of doing nothing or simply following the crowd might be greater. And successful innovations don’t always have to be earth-shatteringly new, whiz bang technology. They simply need to solve problems better than current solutions.

I believe the most successful innovations have at least one of the following characteristics:

1. They create convenience for consumers
   We love convenience, and we’ll sacrifice quality and spend more money to get it. I’ve talked about this previously in my post “Predicting the Future of Retail.”
2. They create efficiencies for businesses
   Efficiencies allow us to make more money faster, and we love that. Given the unusual shapes some toy packaging can take, I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if Amazon’s Frustration Free Packaging is also alleviating frustrations in their warehouse and giving Amazon added efficiency in the supply chain.

It’s important to carefully examine our businesses to truly understand where we have advantages and disadvantages. As is the case with packaging, these advantages might not always be immediately obvious. We really need to dig deep to understand the problems our customers and businesses are facing and then carefully look for ways to solve those problems by leveraging our inherent strengths. In this process, we need to listen hard to our customers to understand their needs. Steve Jobs once famously said, “You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.” He’s right. Customers often can’t give us the specific solution, but if we listen properly they can describe their problems well enough to give us the basis for developing effective solutions.

Innovation usually takes time and money. What can we do this holiday season?

There are lots of little things we can do to improve the experience for customers who come to our sites this holiday season.

1. Truly look at our sites from our customers’ perspective.
   Go to Google and click on one of your search terms. Is the experience what a customer should expect? Try taking a different path on your site to a product than you normally do. How is the experience?
2. Get more product front and center
   Physical stores pack the front of store and end caps with gift ideas. How well does your site parallel this sort of technique?
3. Review your error messages
   A poorly written error message is a shameful way to lose a sale. Go through your site and intentionally generate errors. Put yourself in your customers’ seat. Are those error messages clear and easy-to-understand?

While it may be too late to implement huge changes for this holiday season, it’s certainly not too late to pay attention to customers’ needs and start thinking about what can be done for next holiday season. We can carefully consider our advantages and think about how we could better leverage them next year. And we can carefully consider our disadvantages and think about how we can better mitigate them next year. I’m confident Amazon’s already actively considering their next moves.

What do you think? What tips do you have for retailers for this holiday season? What types of innovations do you see coming?