One of the best examples of irrelevance is the story of how Blockbuster lost to Netflix.
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Irrelevance is more than the opposite of relevance. It’s also the opposite of success, or another word for failure. It happens when “nobody cares.”
Recently, I had a conversation with Scott McKain, a bestselling author and business expert who helps his clients build lasting relevance. He says, “If customers can compare you, they can replace you.” We talked about the concept of irrelevance and how it happens. He mentioned a quote by business coach Marshall Goldsmith, who said, “What got you here won’t get you there,” to emphasize how companies become irrelevant. McKain paraphrased, saying, “What got you here will keep you from getting there.”
McKain’s take is that change and innovation aren’t optional. Some of the world’s best brands became irrelevant because they thought what got them to the top would keep them there.
Two Ways Brands Become Irrelevant
There are two ways a company can become irrelevant. Both start when a company is successful, which is another word for being relevant. The company has a product or service and a customer experience that their customers want. And when they fail their customers, it is usually due to one of two reasons:
First, they fail to innovate their products to keep up with their customers’ expectations and/or don’t pay attention to the competition. One day, leadership notices competitors are chipping away at their market share. Whatever used to set them apart is gone.
Second, companies fail at customer service and the customer experience (CX). Regardless of how good a product is, if you don’t give the customer the experience they expect, they will find another company that will. My 2026 customer service and experience research finds that three out of four customers (73%) are likely to switch companies because of an overall bad customer experience. That number jumps to 82% if the company’s employees exhibit rudeness or apathy. And customers’ tolerance for bad experiences is lower than ever, giving just two chances before they deem you unworthy of their hard-earned dollars. In other words, they deem you irrelevant.
I’ll argue that the faster of these two ways to irrelevance is a poor customer experience.
Blockbuster and Netflix
One of the best examples of irrelevance is the story of how Blockbuster lost to Netflix. Both brands provided a way for their customers to watch movies from the comfort of their homes. The short version of the story is that Blockbuster didn’t continue to innovate the experience. A small competitor, Netflix, had the idea that, rather than making customers go to the store to rent movies, they would send the DVDs through the mail. And, unlike Blockbuster, they didn’t charge late fees.
Even though their products were basically the same, the approach was different. One company found a way to create a more convenient customer experience. Netflix’s innovation came from reducing friction. Customers didn’t have to drive to a store to pick up a movie. They just had to walk to their mailbox.
It didn’t take long for Blockbuster to fall behind Netflix, and unfortunately, it never caught up.
Disruption Creates Irrelevance
There are many obvious examples of irrelevance, and similar to the Blockbuster/Netflix story, they come from disruption:
- Amazon.com became a disruptor to the traditional retail bookstore industry and, eventually, to the entire retail industry. Convenience became the major reason for disruption.
- Best Buy disrupted Circuit City’s market share, but Circuit City’s biggest mistake was trying to recapture its lost sales by focusing on dollars over customers. The company replaced more than 3,000 experienced sales associates with a lower-paid, less knowledgeable staff, thereby eliminating the biggest competitive advantage for which they were known: expertise and customer service.
- Uber disrupted the entire taxicab industry. While there are still taxis out there, the introduction of Uber (and eventually competitors like Lyft) has forever changed consumers’ transportation habits.
None of these stories are about a company coming out with a better product. Amazon sold the same books as the retail bookstores. Best Buy sold the same TVs as Circuit City. And Uber was just a different way to run a taxicab business. But what all three brands did was create a different—as in better—experience. Customers rarely wake up looking for a different company to do business with. They’re looking for an easier company to do business with.
Self-Disruption Avoids Irrelevance
Back to Netflix. If the company had tried to stay in the DVD delivery business, it would have become irrelevant. As convenient as it was for the customers, Netflix saw another way to deliver a better experience, and that was streaming video. They saw it coming, and while they didn’t know it, they were embracing the wisdom of McKain and Goldsmith. What got Netflix to where it was would not get it to where it needed to be to remain relevant and successful. The decision was to replace its original business model with a more relevant model.
Final Words
This short article is meant to get you thinking about your relevance. Are you innovating in the right places?
McKain has a question he asks the business leaders he works with to help make them not only stand out in their market, but also keep them from becoming irrelevant: Are you focusing on your customers of today, or are you focusing on your customers of 2030?
My take is you need to do both.
If you focus on today’s customers, you’ll eventually wake up and discover their expectations have changed. Worse is when you realize a competitor figured that out before you did. But if all you do is focus on tomorrow, you risk losing current customers.
The companies that remain relevant do both. And none of the disrupting companies mentioned won because of a better product. They won because they delivered a better experience.