Part three: Three brands suffering from identity crises

Specific brand amnesia: Forgetting about the competition

Patient: Barnes & Noble
I have to add a bit of a disclaimer here: I’m a book nerd. Always have been, always will be. I love to visit bookstores, perusing shelves and stacks looking for literary treasure. This includes frequent trips to Barnes & Noble.

That being said, however, I’m also a big fan of Amazon. I love the ability to log on and (when looking for a book) browse, read reviews, check out the cover, and have it sent via free two-day shipping (yeah, Amazon Prime!). And that’s just not something I can do at a Barnes & Noble.

More often than not, just due to space considerations, even the largest bookstore cannot stock every single book that every single consumer could possibly want. That’s where the nationwide network of Amazon.com warehouses comes into play. By granting consumers access to virtually any book with a relatively quick shipping option, they gave Barnes & Noble a serious kick in the tail.

In addition to hardcopy books, Barnes & Noble fell way behind the curve when it comes to the digital e-reader revolution. The extremely successful Amazon Kindle has essentially driven the Barnes & Noble Nook into an early grave. The Nook, Barnes & Noble’s expedition into e-readers, simply never cracked the market like the Kindle (in fact, Barnes & Noble hopes to revive its e-reader hopes through a partnership with Samsung and its Galaxy Tab 4).

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