“It’s also coming from us staying private because a lot of our profit we earned from business is going into this. It’s going into R&D. It’s going into more figuring out complicated technology. And it is going into all these charitable activities. One thing it is not going into is buying a private jet for myself. That’s right; it’s not going into that because I’m not interested in it,” he said, chuckling.
Previously on Marketing:
More than 60 years ago, Harvard Business School professor Theodore Levitt famously argued that companies often fail because they focus so narrowly on products and services that they forget to keep in mind the bigger picture: what consumers actually want. Levitt called this problem “marketing myopia,” and it remains a problem to this day. Increasingly, however, companies are struggling with a new affliction, which I call digital myopia.
Amazon is the latest Big Tech company to officially unveil a “sizeable side hustle”. Two weeks ago, the company broke out its ad business (for years, it was classified in company filings under “other revenue”). The punchline: Amazon’s ad platform generated revenue of $31B in 2021, which is nearly 3x the combined sales of Twitter, Pinterest and Snap (all ad-based social platforms).
The Wrigley Co. didn’t start out making chewing gum. In 1891 at age 30, William Wrigley Jr. opened a branch of his father’s Philadelphia-based soap company in Chicago. To each purchaser of Wrigley’s Scouring Soap the young salesman gave a free sample of baking powder. The promotion was so successful Wrigley soon switched to selling baking powder, including two free packs of chewing gum with each order. The gum was so popular that by 1893 Juicy Fruit and Wrigley’s Spearmint chewing gum became the company’s chief product. The soap and baking powder took a permanent powder.
Ikea breaks all of these rules.
Inside, customers are led through a preordained, one-way path that winds through 50+ room settings. The average Ikea store is 300k sq. ft. — the equivalent of about 5 football fields — and their typical shopper ends up walking almost a mile.
Want a lamp? You’re going to have to walk past cookware, rugs, toilet brushes, and shoehorns to get there.
This serves several purposes:
It forces wider product exposure: At most retail shops, customers only lay eyes on ~33% of all the items for sale; Ikea’s layout herds shoppers past its entire catalog.
It creates a false sense of scarcity: When shoppers pass by items they’re on the fence about, they’re inclined to just put them in the cart because they don’t want to backtrack through the maze later on.
It creates a sense of mystery: Every 50 feet, the path breaks left. Shoppers never know what’s around the next turn, stoking their desire to continue exploring
While reading Jim Collins famous book Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't, we discovered about The Hedgehog and the Fox. While the original work was done by Archilochus (680-645 BC). This story gains fame when it was retold as an essay by philosopher Isaiah Berlin in 1953. The theme of the story is simple.
The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. Mr. Collins shows his preference towards a hedgehog mentality. And, since then I used to wonder under what head The Tatas will fit in. After all, over so many decades, they have shown us that they know many things, as well as THE BIG THING.
For years, Amazon has been quietly chartering private cargo ships, making its own containers, and leasing planes to better control the complicated shipping journey of an online order. Now, as many retailers panic over supply chain chaos, Amazon’s costly early moves are helping it avoid the long wait times for available dock space and workers at the country’s busiest ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles…
But if Amazon masters the art of cashierless shopping, as it is trying to do, it could change the buying of groceries as it has everything else, from bookselling to cloud-computing. So far Walmart can pride itself on keeping Amazon at bay while reinventing itself for an omnichannel world. And yet the grocery wars have barely begun. And the size of Amazon’s arsenal is growing.
Lal wanted to be a fighter pilot in the navy but destiny had other plans. Today, with Lal PathLabs, he is at the forefront of a health tech revolution seventy years after his father started the company as a single private diagnostic lab in New Delhi.
In this article we will show how successful DTC brands violated some of marketing’s sacred principles during their early years, and we’ll analyze the core challenges they faced as they attempted to grow. We’ll also propose four principles they should follow to ensure continued success.
The platforms promise precision to their advertisers based on consumers’ data. But they fail to reveal anything like enough information to enable outsiders to gauge the robustness of the digital-ad craze. The result, shared by many in the industry, is blithe optimism that the market will continue to grow like Topsy. The past few days have provided a welcome opportunity to re-examine that thought.
For tens of millions of consumers, it’s easy to say what success looks like on Singles Day, the annual Chinese shopping festival that dwarfs all other retail events on earth. Winning for them means getting a substantial discount on phones, TVs, clothing, cosmetics, vacations, and a multitude of other goods and services
Most of the buzz around recommender systems usually emphasizes replacing choice. Another view is that user models allow the designer to augment the choice architecture. Instead of AI for making choices, maybe we need to think about IA, intelligent augmentation, where choice architecture assists choice
We spend hours consuming news because we want to be informed. The problem is news doesn’t make us informed. In fact, the more news we consume the more misinformed we become.
What explains the appeal of such evidence-free conspiracy theories? Classic psychological explanations focus on negative emotions: when people feel anxious, out of control or uncertain, they become more susceptible to conspiracy narratives.
This is the delightful story of India's 1st marketing wizards, a maverick of the Tata group.
An incredibly thoughtful campaign by Cadbury
The platform work model is reshaping entire economies, sectors, lifestyles, and livelihoods.
You can read thousands of books about the Civil War, but you will never truly know what it felt like to be a Union soldier on top of Little Round Top. You can study the Cold War, but you will never fully understand it unless you watched Nikita Krushchev bang his shoe on the desk at the United Nations. You can read about market crashes, recessions, and depressions, but you cannot fully grasp them unless you have invested through one.
Digital ad fraud could be a $150 billion business by 2025, which would make it the largest criminal enterprise after the drug trade
In April, the number of workers who quit their job in a single month broke an all-time U.S. record. Economists called it the “Great Resignation.” But America’s quittin’ spirit was just getting started. In July, even more people left their job. In August, quitters set yet another record. That Great Resignation? It just keeps getting greater.
