Lessons from General Motors - "no longer in the 'car' business" - can help the news media industry as it struggles to define its place and its path, INMA executive director Earl Wilkinson says.
And he challenges publishers to question, 'what is your business'.
Following a visit San Francisco's Silicon Valley and meeting with GM general manager for advanced technologies Frankie James, he writes in a blog post that "no industry wants to go the way of Kodak and how it clung to the film business long past its useful life".
With General Motors "now in the business of mobility", Wilkinson says that the similarities to the challenges facing the news media industry are "staggering". Both have to re-imagine their value proposition while fighting an old product culture and coping with technological disruption everywhere. Both have to keep pumping out product that pays the bills while reinventing for the emerging ecosystem.
"The challenge is to move the General Motors culture from where the car is the end-all, be-all product to a space focused on urban mobility, car-sharing, ride-sharing, the self-driving car, and other concepts that are disrupting the transportation business," he says. "How does General Motors become more of a utility company than a manufacturer? GM doesn't want to become a white-label manufacturer of Apple cars."
Consumers expect cars to be green-friendly and digitally connected to their mobile lives, and GM sees the merger of vehicle intelligence and connectivity - cars that don't crash, vehicles that drive themselves. Eventually, we will see complex on-demand automation and eventually autonomous driving. "James didn't put dates on these, yet I saw Mercedes Benz suggest at the Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas in January 2015 they will have an autonomous-driving car by 2020 - no doubt a genesis car with no real mass-market," says Wilkinson.
While it works on features such as 'super cruise' - a Cadillac feature that watches the road ahead and adjusts steering to stay in the middle of its lane - collision avoidance, and technology which will allow cars to communicate with each other, the infrastructure, and pedestrians, it is also staring at a range of alternatives to car ownership "that look overwhelming".
Wilkinson says these are all part of the global mega-trend of 'access' over 'ownership' which INMA has discussed this year. "Forget rental cars, taxis, and carpooling of yesteryear. Uber and Lyft are so 2014-2015.
"Rising in importance is shared e-hailing where multiple riders can match with one driver. Look for other fast-rising trends such as on-demand short-term car rentals, person-to-person sharing of vehicles ('Airbnb for cars'), and carpooling with non-professional drivers. These are in the infant changes in San Francisco now, all app and mobile-optimised."
Wilkinson says GM has an "infinitely more complex vision of where 'mobility' is going in the next ten years than media companies" - despite more data points around news consumption and advertising experiences.
And while GM's story is "an annual story" with goals for 2016 and 2017, and an idea of what 2025 looks like - the media story is "a murky month-to-month story", he says.
"Media companies need time horizons for visioning and planning as well as a better storyline that simply connects the dots of what is happening."
GM's "fantastic" contribution to the INMA Silicon Valley Study Tour was part of pushing the edges, he says. "An hour with Frankie James was a truckload of inspiration. So many lessons for media companies."
The full blog is at: http://www.inma.org/blogs/earl/post.cfm/how-gm-shifts-from-cars-to-mobility-and-other-media-analogies#ixzz3uQu6FLIS