In the 80s, the Swiss watch industry was in an existential crisis. Japanese brands had flooded the market after quartz technology became accessible. Seiko, Casio, Citizen… It was like a revolution. Suddenly, Japanese brands could produce less expensive and more accurate watches. Put yourself in the shoes of the Swiss. You see mechanical watchmaking as…
Category: Business Strategy
Bowling Alley Strategy: How New Players Dominate Big Markets
In 2000, Marc Benioff decided to declare war. He founded Salesforce a year earlier and entered the competitive CRM market. And Siebel Systems was the market leader with a 45% market share. So Salesforce desperately needed to get known. Benioff worked with an agency to come up with a bold campaign. You know what was…
Circle Of Competence: How To Increase Your Odds Of Winning in Business
In 2003, things were going great for Robert Brooks. He bought the franchise rights for Hooters restaurant in the 80s and turned it into a successful restaurant chain with 430 branches worldwide. The media mostly paid attention to Hooters Girls. But restaurant businesses are tough. Behind the attention-grabbing ‘breastaurant’ concept, Brooks built a well-functioning system…
How to Make Your Business Antifragile With Redundancy
You saw it on the news. OceanGate’s Titan lost contact with its surface ship on the 18th of June, 2023. The company was organizing touristic visits to the wreckage of Titanic for a “Titanic experience.” A few days later the search and rescue teams found Titan’s wreckage. A tragic ending. People speculated about what caused…
Psychological Moonshots: Radical Product Improvements With Little Cost
Canadian police had a problem with rowdy clubbers in the early 2000s. They made a mess in the streets after the clubs got closed. Shouting, fights, vandalizing… Every single weekend. People who lived in those neighborhoods begged the authorities to find a solution. It wasn’t easy. They tried closing clubs earlier — hoping it’d make…
Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Make Your Competition Irrelevant
In 2001, Casella Wines decided to enter the American market. They were a wine producer from Australia. And CEO John Casella decided that it was time to expand into a bigger market. But the US wine market was as competitive as it gets. Hundreds of wine brands from France, Spain, and California filled the shelves…
Jobs-To-Be-Done: How to Discover The Real Insights That Increase Sales
About 10 years ago, McDonald’s marketing team received an objective from their management. Increase milkshake sales. How hard could it be? Especially for a sophisticated marketing team with an unlimited budget. So they created a focus group that fit the milkshake buyer persona, based on data of millions of customers. And made interviews with them…
The Priming Effect: How Expectations Become Reality
In 1999, a group of Asian-American women students stepped into a room for a math test. But before the test, they had to fill out a form. The first group had questions on gender-related issues. Like what’s their gender, opinions about co-ed dorms, etc. The second group’s questions were about ethnicity. Like what their ethnicity…
Flywheel Effect: How Businesses Go From Good To Great
What is the flywheel effect? The Flywheel Effect is a framework that shows how businesses become great by building a virtuous cycle. Jim Collins defined it in his book Good to Great after he researched patterns of successful companies. In this article, you’ll see how Jeff Bezos’s meeting with Collins shaped Amazon’s fate. And how…
How To Think In Funnels (And Achieve The Best Possible Outcomes)
Thinking in funnels is a mental model that breaks down your goals into different stages. So you can improve the conversion at each stage to achieve the best possible outcomes. We’ll start with a marketing story from the 1890s to understand how it was born. And finish with how to think in funnels. Let’s go.…