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January 26 - February 2, 2024
Brands are two things: promise and performance.
OODA loop: “observe, orient, decide, and act.”
“Failure and invention are inseparable twins. To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it’s going to work, it’s not an experiment.”
the difference between a dot-bomb and a unicorn is a huckster vs. a visionary,
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.
Dying removes the icon from the inevitable judgment of everyday existence, including aging, and elevates persona to legend—ideal for a brand.
Simplicity entails sleek appearance and ease of use—when the interaction with an object sparks delight, brand loyalty increases.
Apple technology is “Simply amazing, and amazingly simple.”
Attractive things work better,”
Jobs most admired was its commitment to making the best (that is, most innovative and highest-quality) products
Technology firms can scale, but they are rarely timeless.
Goliath to make the key point: don’t fight on other people’s terms.
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.
The strongest signal for disbelief is internet usage, accounting for more than a quarter of America’s drift from religion.
You are also less likely to believe in God if you have a high IQ. Only one in six people with an IQ above 140 (uber-smart) report deriving satisfaction from religion.
More than anything else, we want to know.
Research from the Johns Hopkins University Center on Aging and Health found that caregivers had an 18 percent lower mortality rate than noncaregivers.6 Love keeps you alive. It’s Darwinian—the species needs caregivers to skirt extinction.
With appeals to the heart increasingly difficult, brands that appeal to the genitals are thriving.
While history may not repeat itself, it does rhyme, as Mark Twain purportedly said.
Among the Four, these eight factors are prevalent: product differentiation, visionary capital, global reach, likability, vertical integration, AI, accelerant, and geography.
If you don’t have a product that is truly differentiated, you have to resort to an increasingly dull, yet expensive, tool called advertising.
To be a truly large, meaningful company, you need a product that leaps geographic boundaries and appeals to people on a global scale.
If you are perceived as a good actor, a good citizen, caring about the country, its citizens, your workers, the people in your supply chain that get you the product, you have created a barrier against bad publicity.
The less likeable a company, the sooner the regulatory intervention—antitrust, antiprivacy—as questions about its supply chain or any manner of rational concerns are irrationally selected and applied.
We are under the general illusion this process is more thoughtfully examined and based on some sort of equity or the law. Not true: the law decides the outcome, but the rush, or lack thereof, to drag companies into court is subjective. And that opinion is largely based on how nice or chastened the company is perceived to be.
The ROI of investing in the pre-purchase process (advertising) has declined.
A trillion-dollar company must have technology that can learn from human input and register data algorithmically—Himalayas of data that can be fed into algorithms to improve the offering. The technology then uses mathematical optimization that, in a millisecond, not only calibrates the product to customers’ personal, immediate needs but improves the product incrementally every time a user is on the platform for other concurrent and future customers.
Behavioral targeting is now the white meat of marketing. The ability to attach behavior to specific identities is the quiet war taking place in media.
In the last decade, the world’s most important companies have become experts in data—its capture, its analytics, and its use. The power of big data and AI is that it signals the end of sampling and statistics—now you can just track the shopping pattern of every customer in every one of your stores around the world—and then respond almost instantly with discounts, changes in inventory, store layouts, etc. … and do so 24/7/365.
The war for tech-enabled talent has reached a fever pitch. A horseman’s ability to attract and retain the best employees is the number one issue for all four firms. Their ability to manage their reputations, not only among young consumers, but also among their potential workforce, is critical to success.
The team with the best players attracts cheap capital, innovates, and can spark the upward spiral that pulls away from the competition.
But you are directionless. You are like Ironman before he learned how to fly—all over the place. A lot of momentum, a lot of thrust, but not much progress. You need to find the right platform to point you in the right direction and accelerate your career.
Geography matters. There are few, if any, firms that have added tens of billions of dollars in the last decade that aren’t a bike ride from a world-class technical or engineering teaching university.
On average, smart people who work hard and treat people well do better than people whose thinking is muddled, who are lazy, or who are unpleasant to colleagues.
External hires are paid nearly 20 percent more than company veterans at the same level, despite receiving lower performance evaluations and still being more likely to quit.
We touch our phones over 2,600 times a day.2 Merely having your smartphone on your desk causes impairment of cognitive capacity.
Teens who spend five or more hours per day on their devices are 71 percent more likely to have one risk factor for suicide.
We have a perception of these large companies that they must be creating a lot of jobs, but in fact they have a small number of high-paying jobs, and everybody else is fighting over the scraps.
