“Nobody reads the paper anymore,” is a statement we here on a general basis. Right along with music, movies, and the United States Postal service- the internet is banishing all Los Angeles Times customers. If Angelenos aren’t stuck in traffic, we’re finding all our news on social media like everyone else. The awesome weather, and fast paced environment reeks havoc on our newspaper subscription sales. The downtown headquarters is more empty than a Hillary Duff concert. The Los Angeles Times brings fresh ideas, innovative business articles, and even a little Hollyweird tea. We read it, and we love it. The newspaper industry’s subscribers are scarce like Naomi Campbell’s nappy edges. A small marketing and promotional crew, is keeping the whole Times alive. They just aren’t getting credit for it.
May we kindly suggest Los Angeles Times execs take advice from a recent article (6/21/2015) about marketing at Mattel?
Chief Executive Bryan Stockton got the boot in January. Richard Dickson is in charge of the toy making conglomorate, Mattel, now. They watched their sales plummet , as children became more and more addicted to the internet. Power slides, and office politics weren’t doing anything for the overall bottom line. Fisher Price considered taking EBT as a form of payment. Dickson is most passionate, and has already slowly began reinventing the company’s swagger.
Analysts and former executives describe Mattel as a company hampered by a culture that valued cost-cutting over innovation. Some critics blamed Mattel’s tendency to promote business-savvy employees instead of creative types.
When Stockton took over as chief executive officer in 2012, he brought an even more intense focus on cost controls and profit, former executives said. Innovation was often a casualty.
“It got to the point over the last three or four years, the upside on taking risks was not as great as the downside to failure,” one executive said.
Dickson readily admits that Mattel lost its way.
“We became very email-centric, we became very data-centric, we became heavy in process,” he said in a recent interview. “So what we’re trying to do is frankly have more conversations, hear about more ideas, alter different ways for ideas to rise to the top quicker.”
Dickson says his “most vital” goal is to kick-start the core brands, including American Girl, Barbie, Fisher Price and Hot Wheels. He has already reorganized the brands into separate business units and promoted people with deep backgrounds in toy design to head Barbie and Hot Wheels — jobs that traditionally, he said, would have gone to “business-oriented, marketing” types.
Would replacing number crunchers, and family friends, with passionate hard workers, help Los Angeles Times boost sales like Mattel? Do any high paid executives at LA Times, even subscribe to the newspaper? Now that they’ve ruined the kiosk contract with Vons, where will paper vendors collect new members?
