By Ryan Bauss | Vice President | TalkLPnews
There was a point in my life when choosing my MySpace Top 8 felt like a legit responsibility.
You couldn’t just throw anybody in there. Put the wrong friend at number 3 and suddenly your buddy at number 6 was wondering what the hell they did to you. Relationships were tested. Feelings were hurt. Meanwhile, Tom sat silently in everyone’s circle without ever creating any drama.
Then Facebook showed up and MySpace suffered the cruelest fate in tech… it became uncool. Eventually, admitting you still had an account felt like telling someone you still used AOL or had a Hotmail email address. We moved on.
Fast forward twenty years or so and somehow MySpace is back in the news. Maybe it makes a comeback. Maybe it doesn’t. And whether this comeback lasts six months or six years really isn’t the point. We buried MySpace the minute something better came along. We’re pretty good at doing the same thing in retail, and LP might be one of the worst offenders.
I’ve sat through enough demos over the years to hear plenty of tech introduced as the thing that’s going to “change everything.” AI is having its moment now. Before that, it was computer vision, RFID, predictive analytics, automation and whatever else looked good enough on a PowerPoint slide to shake loose some budget dollars.
I’m not knocking any of it. I love new technology. But new doesn’t automatically mean better, and old doesn’t automatically mean obsolete.
Good customer service still deters shoplifters. Cameras positioned where you actually need them still work. Product protection still works. Exception reporting still finds things. Good investigators still build cases. And yes, awareness still matters. Employees who know what to look for can spot things no dashboard ever will. None of that is particularly sexy.
Nobody is sprinting across a trade show floor because they heard someone has a revolutionary new way to conduct a store walk. But did it stop working? Somewhere along the way, though, we started confusing “old” with “doesn’t work anymore.”
LP has its own hype cycle. Something gets hot, pilots start popping up everywhere, conference panels follow and LinkedIn becomes an echo chamber for the next big thing. Then another shiny object rolls into town and suddenly yesterday’s breakthrough starts collecting dust. Innovation shouldn’t be a revolving door. The question shouldn’t be, “What’s new?” It should be, “What works?”
Sometimes the answer will absolutely be AI or a major technology investment. Other times it might be moving a camera ten feet, changing how merchandise is displayed, fixing a broken process or getting stores to consistently execute something we figured out twenty years ago.
Maybe boring isn’t the enemy of innovation. Sticking with something that no longer works is.
I have no idea if MySpace will actually make a comeback. Maybe six months from now we’ll all forget this happened and Tom will disappear into the internet witness protection program again. Where’s that? I don’t know… Ask Jeeves.
But seeing MySpace resurface is a pretty good reminder that we’re pretty quick to bury things. The problem isn’t that some of our LP strategies are old. It’s that we’ve become a little too addicted to replacing them.
Going with the grain wants the next big thing.
Going against the grain wants the thing that actually works.
Don’t just yell at your screen. If this got you thinking, agreeing, disagreeing, or questioning my sanity, send me a message HERE.