There is no such thing as an industry where you will never need to adapt to the times. If you’ve been selling, say, pipe tobacco, a sort of old-fashioned product, something that is of more interest to retirees than it is to millennials, you’re still looking at a market that has shifted from being current and trendy to nostalgic, even if you’ve been selling to the exact same customers for forty years.
Even when an industry itself does not change, the culture surrounding it changes, the context changes. The Mona Lisa is still the Mona Lisa either way, but it will look much different in an antique hand-carved wooden frame than it will in a modern frame made of polished aluminum.
In other words, we all need to adapt to the times, even when our way of adapting is actually to not change at all.
Consider William Gaines, the late publisher of MAD Magazine. Part of the magazine’s appeal was that it was cheap in every way. The humor took cheap shots at celebrities and politicians, the cover price was cheap, and it was printed on the lowest quality paper available. At one the paper that the magazine was printed on actually became quite expensive, and Gaines wound up paying double for rough, flimsy newsprint rather than upgrade to a better quality of paper for less money. Higher quality paper would have actually been cheaper, but MAD’s readers would not have recognized it as feeling cheap. William Gaines actually had to change with the times behind the scenes in order to keep his product from changing.
On the other end of this spectrum you have the record industry. Music companies have been dragged kicking and screaming into the digital age. Napster went live in the Summer of 1999. The iTunes store didn’t debut until April 2003. In the meantime, record companies sabotaged their own PR department by suing teenagers for downloading music. If a company took four years to adapt in the 2010’s, they’d be out of business before they ever had a chance to change their model. By 2014, 35 billion songs had been sold through the iTunes store. Imagine how much bigger that number would be had they jumped on the idea back in 1999.
You might not need to change your product or your brand identity, you don’t need to figure out how to make antique furniture “hip” if you’re courting middle-aged professionals rather than young people. But the times are changing, and if you don’t adjust, you won’t be able to maintain the degree of success you currently enjoy.
Source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Gaines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITunes_Store https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napster
