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

by Scott Galloway

middle-aged humans, who have enormous egos that ensure they, on a regular basis, make an emotional/irrational decision.

While Walmart attempts to bolt on an e-commerce operation to its existing physical retail infrastructure, Amazon is building and acquiring stores to complement its robust online retail—and

Consumers increasingly prefer a channel-agnostic experience,

where digital (specifically your smartphone) serves as the connective tissue between ...

The ability to reserve something on her phone, pay later on mobile or desktop, pick it up in store, and never have to wait in a checkout line is damn near unbeatable.

On the front end of the e-commerce channel, the cost of customer acquisition continues to rise as consumers’ loyalty to brands erodes.

You have to keep reacquiring them.

Amazon has decided it wants off the merry-go-round of high-price acquisition coupled with zero loyalty.

asking people either to join Amazon Prime or leave.

Prime members represent recurring revenue, loyalty, and annual purchases that are 40 percent gre...

Amazon’s fulfillment costs have grown 50 percent since Q1 2012.

That’s not sustainable, unless Amazon can garner membership fees and charge others to use its infrastructure . . .

which is exactly where the compan...

Many of my colleagues in academia and business believe that brand building will always be a winning strategy.

They’re mistaken.

The sun has passed midday on the brand era.

Great statistics in this book...fascinating how brands are on the decline.

Brands are shorthand for a set of associations that consumers use for guidance toward the right product.

when shopping habits migrate online, the design and feel of a product matter much less.

There is no visual merchandising, no endcaps with carefully displayed products.

Voice even further circumvents attributes that brands have spent generations...

With voice, consumers don’t know the price or see the packaging and are less likely to include...

Fewer and fewer searches contain ...

The death of brand, at the hand of Amazon, and in particular Alexa, can be foreshadowed in search queries.

It’s clear that Amazon wants to drive commerce through Alexa, as they are offering a lower price, on many products, if ordered via voice vs. click.

In key categories like batteries, Alexa will suggest Amazon Basics, their private label,

Retailers often leverage their power and custody of the consumer to swap out brands for their own private label. That’s nothing new.

Only we’ve never seen any retailer this good at it.

leading a war on brands to starch the margin from brands and deliver it...

The reason Jeff Bezos is advocating a guaranteed income for Americans is he has seen the future of work and, at least in his vision,

it doesn’t involve jobs for human beings.

Amazon doesn’t talk publicly about robotics, one of its core competencies,

Amazon isn’t unique among the Four in this regard: all do more with less, and all put people out of work.

Amazon’s path to a trillion likely involves a combination of extension into other parts of the retail value chain and further acquisition.

To be fair, Bezos is delivering on his vision to dominate global retail—and

and then to own the infrastructure that most consumer businesses will pay a toll to access.

the real disruption will occur when Amazon opens stores throughout the rest of the world, as it’s planning to in India.

People may love Amazon’s selections, prices, and the convenience of buying online,

but the number-one influencer on consumer decisions i...

Amazon wants to be within an hour of as many people as possible, and Whole Foods is a recipe for that.

Amazon now offers everything you need, before you need it, delivered in an hour to the 500 million wealthiest households on the planet.

Every consumer firm can pay a toll to access an infrastructure less expensive to rent from Amazon than to build itself.

Nobody has the scale, trust, cheap capital, or ro...

This is all supported by an annual payment that includes all sorts of fun stuff: movies, music, a...

Retail is a much, much bigger business than media or telco, and Amazon’s triumph will mean a lot of losers—not just individual companies, but entire industry sectors.

grocery is one of those doomed sectors.

It had it coming. This, the largest consumer sector in America ($800 billion107), has been where innovation goes to die.

the Seattle firm can boast the largest shipper in the United States and Europe—itself—as its first client.

The biggest loser? Easy: Walmart.

Walmart’s e-commerce growth hurdle reaches beyond Seattle: a workforce that’s both underpaid and lacking the skills to close the multichannel circle.