When Amazon was going through a difficult time after the dot com bust, Jim Sinegal and Jeff Bezos met for coffee and Sinegal explained to Bezos that there are two kinds of companies. The first focus on extracting value to[from?] customers and the second focuses on always giving customers value. Costco was firmly the second kind.
Costco inspires a crazy amount of loyalty, largely because of their obsession with the customer.
You might learn something from this post about the warehouse chain.
Everything is customer service.
John Lee Dumas of the Entrepreneurs on Fire podcast said on the Nudge podcast that in a post-AI world
Trust, and then verify
becomes
Doubt, and then verify
How does this shift change your messaging?
& an always timely reminder from Ben Evans:
Your MPs’ WhatsApp group can be secure, or it can readable by law enforcement and the Chinese, but you cannot have encryption that can be broken only by our spies and not their spies. Pick one.
Ben Evans on reactions to new rules or regulations but also probably on your customers & target audience:
when people say ‘no’, they might actually mean one of three different things, and it’s important to understand the difference.
First, and this is the default, they’re saying no because they just don’t like it. ‘No’ just means ‘that’s annoying’.
Second, though, [they] might be saying no because this really will have very serious negative consequences that you haven’t understood.
If the second kind of ‘no’ is ‘that’s a really bad idea’, the third kind is ‘we actually can’t do that’.
Third-party cookies have been killed in the name of privacy, but the short-term replacement is the opposite of privacy-aligned: IP addresses
Once cookies fully deprecate, ad-tech systems already using IP addresses will likely target them with greater frequency as they search for signals to meet advertisers’ goals.
But advertisers shouldn’t expect performance at the level of third-party cookies. IP addresses are more likely to be linked to several individuals than a cookie, meaning that they aren’t as precise, and they are also useless if a user is using a virtual private network
We are underestimating how cheap it’s going to be to copy an existing business in 2024.
You’re no longer measuring in decades when a company will be subject to disruption, I think you’re measuring it in—frankly—months.
If you’re profitable, you have a chance to survive. If you’re unprofitable, you’re going to be under a lot of pressure.
Distinctiveness is the key to brand survival.
When you have a generic content generator, everything looks generic content
generating the content isn’t the expensive part, generating the knowledge is where the cost (and the competitive advantage) lies. AI helps with both, but you need an internal culture that understands the difference.