More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
January 1 - January 6, 2020
Walmart’s share of online sales in 2017 was 1.9 percent, while Amazon’s was 36.2 percent.
It’s hard—or impossible—to compete with a giant who doesn’t need to make money,115 and who reinvests earnings into deeper moats against the competition.
Amazon is Google’s largest customer and is better at optimizing search than Google is at optimizing Amazon.
Searches for product are lucrative—they
Amazon’s search franchise may rival Google’s in value someday, as the people looking to spend start their search at Amazon.
Each year, Google and brand.coms lose product search volume to Amazon (6 to 12 percent for retailers for 2015 to 2016).
55 percent of product searches start on Amazon (vs. 28 percent on search engines such as Google).
This shifts the power, and margin, from Google and retailers to Amazon.
There is a rebel force of innovative retailers out there who are fighting the empire: Sephora, Home Depot, and Best Buy, to name a few.
These firms are zigging as Amazon zags and investing in people—beauty associates, blue shirts, geek squads, and gold canvas aprons.
They couple this investment in human capital with a deft inves...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Consumers no longer go to stores for products, which are easier to get from Amazon. They go t...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
We thus have, in essence, fetishized the iPhone, and in the process opened the door to a new kind of corporate extremism to emerge.
this kind of secular worship is dangerous.
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, following Jobs’s return to Apple,
the company embarked on the greatest run of innovation in business history.
In those ten years, Apple introduced one earth-shaking, 100-billion-dollar, category-creating new pro...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
The iPod, iTunes, iPhone, and iPad . . . there has never bee...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
The unsung hero of Apple’s success is Napster founder Shawn Fanning, who scared the music industry into the arms of Apple,
he turned Apple, after the risk-averse years under John Sculley, into a company—arguably the biggest company ever—that made taking risks its first option.
Steve Jobs—not Bob Noyce at Intel or David Packard at HP—became the first person to found a company and then make it the most valuable company in the world. Stores,
For all the good that Jobs did for Apple, he was also a destructive force inside the company.
He bullied employees; his attitudes around philanthropy and inclusiveness were small; his mercurial personality and megalomania kept Apple perpetually in borderline chaos.
His death ended the company’s historic run of innovation, but it also let Apple, under Tim Cook, focus on predicta...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
You can see the results on the balance sheet: if profits are a sign of success, in fiscal year 2015 Apple was the most successful firm in history,...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
The sector that has inspired Apple’s modern-day strategy is the luxury industry.
The Cupertino firm controls 19.2 percent of the smartphone market, but captures 87 percent of global smartphone profits
Apple would drop “Computer” from its corporate name in recognition that the concept of the computer was anchored in the past.
The future would be about stuff, from music to phones, powered by computers.
The customer could carry these branded products aroun...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
A kind of meta-scarcity is key to Apple’s success.
It may sell millions of iPods, iPhones, and Apple Watches, but likely only 1 percent of the world can (rationally) afford them—and that’s how Apple wants it.
I’ve been advising luxury brands for twenty-five years and believe these firms, from Porsche to Prada,
share five key attributes: an iconic founder, artisanship, vertical integration, global reach, and a premium price.
CEOs come and go, but founders are forever.
Art, and the democratization of art (artisanship), fuels and sustains their brands.
Each store gave the customer a place to experience the brand Drexler envisioned.
He wasn’t selling luxury but creating a world around the brand and engaging the consumer face-to-face.
He was taking a page from luxury brands and creating a simula...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
His strategy stoked revenue and profits, and The Gap began a twenty-year run that was the...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Drexler recognized that while television could broadcast a brand’s message,
physical stores could go much further. They gave customers a place to step into the brand, to smell it and touch it.
So, while Gap’s key rival, Levi’s, continued to create the best TV commercials, Drexl...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
It’s difficult to remember now, but when Apple made that move back then, most people figured the company was wrong; that Apple was a company lurching toward irrelevance;
The stores, of course, changed the tech industry—and advanced Apple as a luxury company.
The iPhone drove Apple’s share, but stores drove the brand and margin.
It wasn’t the iPhone, but the Apple Store, that defined Apple’s success.
Rich people are more homogeneous than any cohort on earth.
Mass market retailers, including Walmart and Carrefour, have to hire ethnographers to guide them in local markets.
But luxury brands, including Apple, define their own universe.
