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Friday, March 29, 2024

Indie business model

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I seldom watch local films, but after seeing “That Thing Called Tadhana” (English: That Thing Called Destiny), it’s literally a breath of fresh air. It is now touted as the most commercially and critically successful local “indie” film bagging a multitude of awards and grossing P120 million in three weeks. Credit goes to rookie director and scriptwriter, Antoinette Jadaone, who has written several indie films scripts and clearly brought this genre the fore.

Gaining attention of consumers

Indeed, indie has gained the attention of local consumers, and globally, there has been an upsurge in followers of “indie” materials. In fact, in the latest Oscar Awards, indie films Birdman and Boyhood fought it out for best picture where the former emerged as winner. But both films raked most of the awards in the 2015 Golden Globe Awards. In last year’s Grammy Awards, indie music took home 50 percent of the awards, the highest percentage of wins ever.

Even in digital book publishing, ebooks sales going to indie authors is pegged at 12 percent in 2014 and is forecasted to capture 50 percent of the US ebook market by 2020, according to indie ebook publisher Smashwords.

In the brick-and-mortar world of publishing, sales of indie books have grown 8 percent annually in the last few years, exceeding the growth of books sales itself, according to the Association of American Publishers. This leads to the rebirth of indie bookstores, akin to the likes of now-extinct Borders.

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Other brick-and-mortar business like indie craft beer joints is “about to boom” in the US, according to a report of Time. Craft beer is a type of beer made in a traditional or non-mechanized way by a small brewery.

Spreading like wildfire

So why is indie spreading like wildfire? Short for independent, it refers to non-traditional film, music, art, or literature created outside the mainstream consciousness and without corporate financing. The indie concept has caught up with other businesses such as video games, television shows, crafts, fashion and modelling, supermarkets, coffee shops, and other brick-and-mortar business. All of these businesses are showing unprecedented growth.

And why? Two drivers explain this remarkable development.

First is technology. Digitization has allowed easy creation and delivery of content such as movies, music and ebooks. The Internet and search engine technologies have also allowed consumers to search, evaluate, and order such content, making it easier for them to look for indie content.

Related to technology is the growth in community groups and co-ops that bring together indie authors, movie, game, and music producers. On-line forums and communities allow them to share best practices, gain bargaining power with distributors, and create a cooperative that sells indie products.

Second is the growing population of indie consumers who consciously avoid mainstream marketing and pledge allegiance to lesser known brands and products. All indicators point to this trend as more and more consumers break away from the traditional brands, and search for those that give more meaning.

Allowing the business to flourish

These drivers allow an indie business to flourish. But for this to happen, an indie product or business should have six main characteristics.

First is the passion of doing it. The businessman or entrepreneur should love what he or she is doing, may it be writing a novel, or composing a song, or brewing craft beer.

Second is autonomy and freedom to explore and produce freely anything one loves doing. This means that the businessman or entrepreneur is free from the shackles of big corporate control.

Third is authenticity and idealism in producing the product. Like the movie “That Thing Called Tadhana”, the scriptwriter stuck to her roots of realism in life, avoiding the commonplace pageantry in romantic movies.

Fourth is originality and creativity to explore, experiment and create new things, such as new forms of music or art, or new concepts in movies. For an indie to succeed it must be more innovative than bigger and powerful competitors.

Fifth is experience—the ability to hook and enthrall customers through sensorially going through even the most abject realisms of life, like feeling the main character in a movie, or tasting a home-made beer, or sifting through the old pages of a lesser-known-authored book.

Lastly is cost-effectiveness in producing and distributing the indie product. The movie of Jadaone depended on a grant of P2 million from Cinema One Originals—she started working on the film, using the money to, “shoot the best way we can”.

Indie is here to stay, and even grow rapidly. There is obviously a business case for it.

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Reynaldo C. Lugtu Jr. teaches strategy, management and marketing courses in the MBA Program of the Ramon V. del Rosario College of Business, De La Salle University.  He may be e-mailed at rlugtu2002@yahoo.com, or visit his blog at http://rlugtu.blogspot.com.

The views expressed above are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the official position of De La Salle University, its faculty and its administrators.

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