I don’t really know if what I’m about to write here is true.
I haven’t fully thought it through, and even if I did, I probably wouldn’t have the data to prove it either way. But true or not, it’s elegant. And as Paul Dirac said, “A theory of beauty is more likely to be true than one that fits the experimental data”.
So let’s just go for it.
I think you can identify “strategic eras” in business, whereby there is a general “stock strategy” that most great businesses in that time period use to get leverage.
Of course if I was being “purist” about it I would say the strategy for each business is unique – based on its specific context and market factors. This is true. But equally there is a higher context that all businesses share regardless of sector, that enables us to predict the general strategy that might work for most of them.
In other words, if in doubt, you can just adopt the general strategy of your era, and probably do OK.
So what are these strategies?
I reckon it’s something like this:
1960 -1980: Supply strategy
1980 – 2000: Optimisation strategy
2000 – present: Democratisation strategy
The logic runs something like this.
First we had a period where there was less supply of each good than the market wanted. Therefore the way to win was simply to answer that demand. If you read Phil Knight’s book Shoe Dog, you can see that the story of Nike in that era was fundamentally one of generating supply – almost nothing to do with “brand” at all.
Then, as production and communication became cheaper and more advanced, the supply issue was solved so we entered a new era: optimisation. Here it wasn’t just about supplying the thing, but improving its efficacy and quality. Most industries at this point were dominated by clearly sub-optimal offerings, so there was a lot of headroom to do things “better”. Of course I always warn people against “better” strategies, but that’s because the options in most industries today are pretty good – but this wasn’t true back in 1988.
Finally when satisfactory quality became the norm we entered the modern era, which is one of democratisation. To understand this fully, you have to recognise that the optimisation era created a lot of complexity and inaccessibility as a by-product of the rush to “improve”. You can visualise this clearly if you think about the stuffy, formal, faux-scientific consulting climate of the 1990s. You wanted things to appear complex because this implied efficacy and sophistication. This then created the opportunity for democratisation: making everything more simple, informal, human, and friendly.
The archetypal example of this (which probably ushered in the era) was the original colourful iMac back in 1999 – but there are loads of other examples.
- Starbucks democratised real Italian coffee
- Zara democratised high fashion trends
- Amazon democratised e-commerce
- Tesla democratised EVs
- Etc etc
Look around today and you can see ever more brands doing the same thing in new industries – e.g. Canva has democratised design, or how Alex Smith (ahem) is democratising strategy.
There is this giant wave of democratisation tearing through every industry on the planet, but they are all falling at different rates. Some industries were democratised 20 years ago. And some haven’t been democratised yet. And yet this is the macro story they all share.
The hallmarks of a democratisation strategy include:
- Hiding or removing complexity
- Direct informal language
- Heavy emphasis on design
- Digitisation (many would say this is the macro strategy itself, but it isn’t, it’s a subset of democratisation)
- A dramatic lowering of costs
You’d be well-served to consider your own industry, and give it a score as to how democratised it has become. If you’re lucky, it will still be early on this curve, stuck in the optimisation era, and then there’s probably some serious hay to be made.
Examples of industries that are yet to fully democratise are:
- Higher education
- Consulting
- Most medicine
- Law
- Elements of real estate
- Etc.
Basically any industry that still has a whiff of “expertise” about it (which is a hangover from the optimisation era) still needs to be democratised.
The one remaining question here is: what comes next?
What comes after democratisation? Are there any clues, or early movers? And what should you do if you’re in an already-democratised industry?
Honestly I don’t know. But if we want a clue we need to look at the downsides of the prior era, leading to a correction in the new. Optimisation was a correction of supply, and democratisation was a correction of optimisation. So what would be a correction of democratisation?
My prediction would be “humanisation”. Sorry this is a crap word, but basically I mean shifting brands and industries more underneath the stewardship of famous individuals. The reason this might occur is because democratisation tends to “flatten” industries and make them kinda bland. Indeed democratisation is responsible for the “blanding” trend, if you’re familiar with that term. Putting actual human faces front and centre is a great way to remedy that, and there are already plenty of examples of this – for example with the YouTuber-led brand launches from Mr Beast, Logan Paul, etc.
There are probably other ways to combat the blandness of democratisation without leaning on a human being. Any injection of personality, character, and exclusivity also does the job. Liquid Death did this. Aimé Leon Dore did this. Anything that attacks democratisation’s “we are for everyone” ethos with a “we are not for everyone” response.
But understand: this only works in industries that have been made fully accessible.
If you overlay this onto an industry still dominated by optimisation, you’re just adding weirdness to complexity. Not a great blend.
So there you go. Zero thinking required. Just see where your industry is on this timeline, and execute accordingly. That’ll be $70,000 please.
Or… this could all be bollocks.
I’m not sure. But it was fun to write about anyway.
