Category: Brand

  • vs Amazon

    I had an interesting conversation with a start-up founder recently, one whose business had received multiple rounds of funding and is scaling well. Our chat soon moved into listing on Amazon/other horizontals, and I was reminded of my post from earlier this year – The Shrinking Shelf Life of Ecosystems. I had written how the advantages of dominating the triumvirate – distribution, product and brand – now have a shrinking shelf life.

    I had taken DTC brands as an example of this. But while that is relatively true and there are enough unicorns around, in absolute terms, the distribution might of Amazon and other horizontals continues to be formidable. In this insightful post – Bonsai Brands – Simon Andrews explains that while it might be “easy” to get about $50m, the journey to $100m and beyond gets tougher because efficiencies start maxing out. They could remain viable businesses at a certain scale. (more…)

  • The shrinking shelf life of ecosystems

    One of my favourite business frames in the recent past has been Jeremy Liew’s “When a consumer market is new, distribution wins. As consumers become educated, product wins. When products reach parity, brand wins.”

    Two events happened in the last fortnight that made me reflect more on this. The first was Apple’s power move on Facebook and Google. The second one was here in India – FDI regulations affecting Amazon and Flipkart. Both were shows of influence, and involved distribution.

    It made me realise that the shelf life of this entire distribution-product-brand cycle is shrinking. Disruption is happening far before organisations can take advantage of wins at a previous level. (more…)

  • Evolving against entropy

    ​In the last fortnight, I had two interactions with customer care teams. The first was Kotak, for a bank account. There were failures at multiple levels, but the biggest takeaway was how difficult it was to get through to a human. Chatbots have their uses but this was extreme! Twitter DMs weren’t a help either. The second was Amazon, and that surprisingly included being put on hold for about 15 minutes and transferred 5 times! Thankfully, the problem was resolved in 30. But given the famed Amazon customer-centricity, this was a disappointment, and I wondered if at scale, it was inevitable. 

    What causes it? The best frame I have seen is entropy. (via) Yes, that physics and thermodynamics thing – the degree of disorder/randomness in the system. Though the meaning remains the same, the application changes. In the context of a business, it is the tax applied by the system between input and output. Just imagine the effort that is required to get things done in a corporate structure as against a startup. While it is theoretically possible for a complex system to have lesser entropy than a simple system, I have not seen it in practice. I can imagine why it is so – the randomness that can be generated by different touchpoints, and their optimization for following rules as opposed to providing solutions. What happened to me with Kotak and Amazon were examples of that.   (more…)

  • Brand – ego vs evolution

    In my previous post on brands, I had briefly touched upon the brand’s integrity of intent as an imperative to its success. I brought up two approaches to it – one based on self image and the other based on self actualisation. The first is a target, the second is exploration. While I was agnostic to the approach earlier, the book I am reading now – Matt Ridley’s The Evolution of Everything – has given me a bias for the latter.

    This is why – evolution has been the longest running phenomenon ever, beating anything made by man quite easily. Because before there was mind, there was matter, whether it was perceived or not. That includes even the idea of God, which is probably the best brand ever built. Arguably, evolution’s success can be attributed to its having no end goal in mind. Can that work for a brand? (more…)

  • Brand with a worldview – Part 2

    I think my first thoughts on the subject appeared in 2012 – Mean better than average, featuring Cleartrip, who had put a non-customer in place with sarcasm after a polite conversation failed. It took another 5 years for a redux in Feels & Fields in Marketing. The framing was that if the end game was for the brand to be the first choice when a consumer thinks of the category, what would be the strategy in a world of attention scarcity? Using the powers of targeting and personalisation to catch the customer at the right time and place (medium + stage of a funnel) with the right messaging, or having a world view that is so relatable to a kind of customer that the brand becomes entrenched in his/her mind? Or both?

    I followed it up with  Brand with a worldview, which had examples from the Super Bowl 2017 ads, many of which had an overt or covert political stance. My inference was that we are largely irrational creatures, and absolutely prone to confirmation biases. We’d love our brands to echo our world view… Smart money would be on brands that can use data to glean consumer sentiment beyond domain, and leverage that understanding when forming a world view.

    This post takes the thought forward, and I have framed it quite simplistically with 3 aspects – customer, competition, and company. We also have a hot example to embellish the hypothesis – Nike! Tons have been written about its latest adventures, but let’s just overdo it anyway. (more…)