Fortune has a very interesting article by Mike Jones, formerly CEO of Myspace in its attempted-comeback years, on what he learned during the process of trying to turn around the ailing social network. He admits it was a mistake to keep faith in the Myspace brand rather than launch something new. “We found that regardless of how much we improved the product or the marketing message — consumers’ memories about the brand were too strong to allow them to view Myspace with fresh eyes and an open mind. We could not escape their images of animated GIFs… In the end, I believe Myspace would have had a better chance for success if we had relaunched it as an entirely new brand.” He also suggests that when trying to change a big established brand, drastic change is needed to the staffing. “Do not underestimate how deeply muscle memory is embedded in the company’s processes and staff – so much so that even significant staff changes often do not result in the desired increase in efficiency,” he writes. “It was only through major change, a full disruption to the system, that we were able to galvanize the organization around new goals and begin seeing increased efficiencies. Slow behavioral change creates slow process change.”
More proof that the then-MySpace CEO is as clueless now as he was then. They TRIED to relaunch it by remarketing it as a music service rather than social networking. That failed. Miserably. It was in the news at the time. He wants to blame it on stubborn visitors of the site.
No, the problem is the same it was then, his refusal to listen to what fans of MySpace kept telling him and his stubbornness in pursuing a Facebook clone rather than MySpace’s original strengths. They wanted a new Facebook-esque image to the extent they remodeled MySpace at the cost of everyone who liked the old MySpace, ignoring the protests in their stubbornness.
The problem was in fact their stubborn attempts TO rebrand MySpace. MySpace lost popularity because of their silly Profile 2.0 and 3.0 changes that were in affect attempts to replace MySpace with Facebook. Then when that failed, rather than just listen to people wanting them to revert to the original MySpace 1.0, they tried to rebrand as a music site. Obviously it failed because the products they wanted were inferior to the original MySpace which, had they listened to MySpace users and kept, would’ve resulted in sustained popularity. They never listened or tried that.