Thanks to the new Netflix drama The Queen’s Gambit (and the fact that new TV shows are starting to slow to a bit of a trickle), there’s been a lot of interest in chess recently. Now in...
Read moreAll businesses have a brand. All have a product. All have people, sales, marketing, and various other building blocks which add up to “a company”. But not all - in fact very few -...
Read moreA couple of years ago I heard an executive from Quorn speak at a conference. Normally talks like these are just boring propaganda pieces, but his was usually thoughtful and candid. One point...
Read moreWhen I want to make a point about strategy, I often refer to a famous brand in order to do it. So does everyone of course, and because there are so few brands out there who are strategically...
Read moreCoke famously started life as a pharmaceutical product. Tiffany’s was a stationery store. Nokia, a paper mill. Together they represent particularly acute examples of a truth which...
Read moreAll startup brands are the same. This was the implication of a Bloomberg article about the rise of what it called “the blands” - the army of VC backed DTC brands you see everywhere...
Read moreThere are only two kinds of value offering a business can make: 1 - Enhancing an existing value the market 2 - Bringing a new value to the market Generally speaking, 1 is weak and 2 is...
Read moreWhen I was around 15, me and a pal went to see the movie Collateral, starring Tom Cruise. In it Cruise played a colder-than-ice assassin on the streets of a neo-noir Los Angeles. Sufficed...
Read moreThe other day on Twitter, a chap asked a perfectly reasonable question: “Zoom is now worth $130B and I still don’t know what their moat is. Brand?” His question is a variation of...
Read moreStrategy is traditionally seen as a forward-looking exercise. This stands to reason since, in the words of my pal Robin Bonn, every strategy is essentially a “bet” that a certain course of...
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