The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google

by Scott Galloway

We’re irrational and generous when under the influence.

We’re very in the moment.

Luxury brands have understood this f...

They bypass cognition and love, tying their business to sex and the broader and pleasure-packed ...

These decisions, if you can call them that, cast the consumer and provider into a symbiotic relationship. The consumer spends more because the act of spending itself communicates taste, wealth and privilege, and desire.

The company, naturally, is dedicated to the same proposition, but in reverse, by providing consumers with the tools of that communication.

luxury is irrational, which makes it the best business in the world.

The body framework—brain, heart, and genitals—bears directly on the extraordinary success of the Four.

Consider Google. It speaks to the brain, and supplements it, scaling up our long-term memory to an almost infinite degree.

ultimately most important, we trust the results of Google searches—even more than our own, sometimes fitful, memories. We don’t know how the Google algorithm works—but trust it to the point of betting our careers, even lives, on its answers.

Google has become the nerve center of our shared prosthetic brain.

It dominates the knowledge industry the way Walmart and Amazon, respectively, rule o...

And it certainly doesn’t hurt that when Google reaches into our pockets, it’s mostly for p...

We don’t care how big and dominant Google has become, because our experience of it is small, intimate, and personal.

Google gives the consumer the best answer, for less, more quickly than any organization in history. The brain can’t help but love Google.

If Google represents the brain, Amazon is a link between the brain and our acquisitive fingers—our hunter-gatherer instinct to acquire more stuff.

Facebook, by contrast, appeals to our hearts.

that it connects us with friends and family.

Facebook is the world’s connective tissue: a combination of our behavioral data and ad revenue that underwrites a Google-like behemoth.

Facebook’s genius was not just in giving us yet another place on the web to establish our identities, but also the tools to enable us to enrich that presentation—and to reach out to others in our circle.

The unseen power of Facebook is that it not only deepens our connections to those groups, but

by providing more powerful, multimedia lines of communication, it expands our connections to more members. This makes us happier; we feel accepted and loved.

Apple has migrated further down the torso. Its self-expressive, luxury brand appeals to our need for sex appeal.

Only by addressing our procreative hungers could Apple exact the most irrational margins, relative to peers, in business history and become the most profitable firm in history.

The lust for Apple-branded goods has given the company its cult-like status.

People who belong to this cult pride themselves on their hyperrational choice to buy Apple products based on their ergonomic design, superior operating system, and resistance to viruses and hackers.

But people outside the cult see it for what it is: a rationalization for something a lot closer to lust.

You don’t camp out in front of a store waiting for the next-generation iPhone because you’re making a sound decision.

The current horsemen look so gigantic, rich, and dominant that it would seem impossible to attack them directly. And that’s probably the case,

but history suggests there are other strategies.

After all, each of these companies in their day had to take on equally dominant and established co...

How could Apple, started by two scruffy phone hackers in a garage, possibly compete with these monsters?

It did so with a combination of fearlessness, superior design, and luck.

no corporation was going to buy his computers when they could buy inferior, but adequate, machines at a lower price and guaranteed volume delivery.

So, Jobs instead went after the individual consumer. There, he had free reign:

his small competitors were stuck building hobby machines that average folks did...

Then something interesting happened: those same consumers started sneaking their Apple computers into the office.

That was the beginning of Apple “cool”—users felt like mavericks, corporate guerillas, fighting the Man in the MIS department.

Google did the same thing by pretending to be small, cute, and honest with its simple homepage—even after it crushed all other search engines.

Remember, Google started on Yahoo, which decided to outsource search to the little engine that could—and did: Google became a hundred times more valuable than Yahoo, which didn’t see the threat.

Facebook’s roots on Ivy League college campuses made it feel more upmarket and safe: it demanded a .edu email address.

The requirement to confirm, and share, one’s identity created a different, more civilized decorum on Facebook.

Amazon was careful never to portray bookstores as competition, even asserting that they wanted them to survive—the

Similarly, as Amazon invests billions in last-mile delivery, Mr. Bezos claims Amazon has no intention of replacing UPS, DHL, or FedEx, but to “supplement” them.

There is no reason to believe that these strategies—insurgency, false humility, security, and simplicity plus discounting—won’t work again one day against the horsemen.

Giant companies face their own...

they lose their best talent to more rewarding start-ups; their physical plant grows old; their empires grow so big they can no longer coordinate all their pieces; they get distracted by...

The processes put in place to scale begin slowin...

It may seem unlikely that Amazon will one day lose its way. It will.

Business mimics biology and, thus far, the mortality rate is 100 percent. The same is true of the Four. They will die.