More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
If you look at the influences that convince a consumer to spend money, Facebook has flooded the awareness stage, the top of the marketing funnel.
Facebook gestates intent better than any promotion or advertising channel. Once in pursuit, we go to Google or Amazon to see where to get it. Thus Facebook is higher up the funnel than Google. It suggests the “what,” while Google supplies the “how” and Amazon the “when” you will have
The study found that the depth and meaningfulness of a person’s relationships is the strongest indicator of level of happiness.
Seventy-five years and $20 million in research funds, to arrive at a three-word conclusion: “Happiness is love.” Love is a function of intimacy and the depth and number of interactions we have with people. At its best, Facebook both taps into our need for these relationships, and helps nourish them. We’ve all felt it. There’s something satisfying in rediscovering someone you knew twenty years ago, and keeping in touch with friends after they move away. When friends post pics of their new baby, we get a delicious hit: dopamine.11
Empathy is what makes us more human. The explosion in images distributed on social media platforms has led to more empathy, which should make us less likely to gas children, or at least inspire us to hunt down those who do these things. It’s common knowledge that countries that trade with one another are less likely to go to war with one another.
younger generation’s belief that “to be is to share,”
We absorb imagery sixty thousand times faster than words.
Jeff Bezos highlighted in one of his famous investment letters that what kills mature companies is an unhealthy adherence to process.
Outfits like the Economist, Vogue, and the New York Times may benefit, at least for a while, because their weaker competitors will die. That, and a sudden recognition that “truth” is a thing again, will give them momentary gains in market share. But the operative word is “momentary.”
The New York Times, for example, gets about 15 percent of its online traffic from Facebook.
A religion that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science, might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by conventional faiths. Sooner or later, such a religion will emerge.
Only one in six people with an IQ above 140 (uber-smart) report deriving satisfaction from religion.
And we pour out the deepest questions of our heart to our modern-day god: “Why is he not calling me back?” “How do you know if you should get a divorce?” And answers, mysteriously, appear. Google’s algorithms, a work of divine intervention in the eyes of most of us, summon compilations of useful information. The Mountain View search firm answers the questions that plague us, trivial and profound, easing our suffering. Its search results are our benediction: “Go. Take your newfound knowledge and live a better life.”
we confess things to Google that we wouldn’t share with our priest, rabbi, mother, best friend, or doctor. Whether it’s stalking an old girlfriend,
Look at your recent Google search history: you reveal things to Google that you wouldn’t want anyone to know. We believe, naively, that nobody (but the Big Guy) can listen to our thoughts. But let’s be clear … Google too is listening.
“Don’t Be Evil,” attempts to reinforce the divine benevolence of this near-supreme being.
When the Times uncovered this optimization, JCPenney promptly felt the wrath of God. The company was banished to oblivion: second page on Google’s search results, the equivalent of being left on the far bank of the Jordan River.22
faux pas:
mindedness, the company has done just that. It began with the stuff already on the web—it couldn’t own that, but it could become the gatekeeper to it. After that, it went after every location (Google Maps), astronomical information (Google Sky), and geography (Google Earth and Google Ocean). Then it set out to capture the contents of every out-of-print book (the Google Library Project) and work of journalism (Google News).
Facebook built its foundation on a second lie, repeated thousands of times in early meetings between Facebook’s army of sales reps and the world’s largest consumer brands: “Build big communities and you will own them.” Hundreds of brands invested hundreds of millions on Facebook to aggregate enormous branded communities hosted by Facebook. And by urging consumers to “like” their brands, they gave Facebook an inordinate amount of free advertising. After brands built this expensive house, and were ready to move in, Facebook barked, “Just kidding, those fans aren’t really yours; you need to rent
...more
Ben Horowitz, Peter Thiel, Eric Schmidt, Salim Ismaiel, and others argue that extraordinary business success requires scaling at low cost, achieved by leveraging cloud computing, virtualization, and network effects to achieve a 10x productivity improvement over the competition.
From the perspective of evolutionary psychology, all successful businesses appeal to one of three areas of the body—the brain, the heart, or the genitals. Each is tasked with a different aspect of survival.
With appeals to the heart increasingly difficult, brands that appeal to the genitals are thriving. These organs drive desire and the relentless instinct to procreate.
We’re irrational and generous when under the influence.
LVMH commands more value than Goldman Sachs.11
The body framework—brain, heart, and genitals—
Google. It speaks to the brain, and supplements it, scaling up our long-term memory to an almost infinite degree.
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 represents the brain, Amazon is a link between the brain and our acquisitive fingers—our hunter-gatherer instinct to acquire more stuff.
Historically, the more stuff we had, the more secure and successful we felt. We
Facebook, by contrast, appeals to our hearts. Not in the manner that the Tide brand appeals to your maternal instincts of love, but in 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 is all about emotion. Human beings are social creatures; we aren’t built to be alone. Take us away from family and friends and, research has shown, we’ll have a greater chance of depression and mental illness, and a shorter life.
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.
Apple’s marketing and promotion have never been traditionally sexy. The message is not that owning an Apple product will make you more attractive to the opposite (or same) sex. Rather—and this is common with great luxury brands—the message is that it will make you better than your sexual competitors: elegant, brilliant, rich, and passionate.
Among the Four, these eight factors are prevalent:
product differentiation, visionary capital, global reach, likability, vertical integration, AI, accelerant, and geography. These
map out the value chain of your product or service from the origin of the materials through its manufacture, retail, usage, and disposal … and identify where technology can add value, or remove pain, from the process/experience. You’ll find that this value can affect every step—and if you happen to spot a step where it hasn’t, start a new company there. Amazon
“Product” is experiencing a renaissance, and is the first factor in the T Algorithm. If you don’t have a product that is truly differentiated, you have to resort to an increasingly dull, yet expensive, tool called advertising.
ability to attract cheap capital by articulating a bold vision that is easy to understand.
Organizing the world’s information. Simple, compelling, and a reason to buy the stock.
Connecting the world.
over Thanksgiving weekend 2016, Amazon captured the largest overall share of organic results for top gift items.
As J.Crew chairman Mickey Drexler points out, “It’s impossible to compete with a big company that doesn’t want to make money.”
The ultimate gift, in our digital age, is a CEO who has the storytelling talent to capture the imagination of the markets while surrounding themselves with people who can show incremental progress against that vision each day.
the ability to control the consumer experience, at purchase, through vertical integration.
Cartier has caught, or possibly surpassed, Rolex’s brand equity by making a big bet on its in-store experience. It turns out that where and how you buy a watch is as important as which tennis player wears that watch. Maybe more.
ROI of investing in the pre-purchase process (advertising) has declined. That’s why successful brands are forward integrating—owning their own stores or shopper marketing.
both control their entire user experience. The biggest innovation for Apple is considered to be the iPhone—but what put the company on track to be a trillion-dollar company was the genius move into retail, usurping control over its distribution and brand. A decision that, at the time, made little or no sense.
A company has to be vertical to reach half a trillion dollars in market valuation. That’s easier said than done, and most brands leverage other companies’ distribution, as distribution is expensive to build. If you’re clothing designer Rebecca Minkoff, you’re not going to build your own stores beyond a dozen flagship locations around the world; you don’t have that capital. Instead, you sell your products at Macy’s and Nordstrom’s. Even if you’re Nike, it’s much more efficient to sell through Foot Locker than to build your own stores.
