Community Lessons, Predicting Brand Success, Shopify Becoming Amazon, Consumer Tech Alive and Well, B2B Marketing Trends
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Sweet lessons about the basics of community from an audio shop
Last week I ordered some audio equipment (wonder what for 🤔) from a company I'd never ordered anything. They didn't send me the usual automated text, with some link to buy more, or offer me a discount to "thank me" and encourage me to order again.
Community building comes in many shapes and sizes, and isn't always as obvious as spinning up a platform and intentionally bringing people together.
Predicting a brand’s success: signals to look for
How to detect winners early on
This identity can be reflected in an enduring brand’s style and language (Nike, White Claw, Patagonia), stylistic idiosyncrasies (Apple, GOOP, Fenty, Tracksmith) or semiotic invariants (Aesop, Supreme, MSCHF).
Having both functional and symbolic sides as part of the balance sheet allows a company to protect its pricing power, ensure high margins, create trust, and cut transaction costs.
Can Shopify Compete With Amazon Without Becoming Amazon?
If the key to Amazon’s success has been to put the customer first, for Shopify the key has been to put the merchant first.
Store owners, instead of having to worry about all the technical complexities that go with processing payments, managing checkout flows and working with JavaScript, could upload some pictures of their wares to Shopify, set prices, provide their bank account information and start selling.
In the dark days of April and May, when even Amazon’s usual performance sputtered and those with Prime subscriptions faced delivery dates months into the future, consumers for the first time in years turned elsewhere — their neighborhood hardware store, their local fishmonger, the organic catering company that brought them lunch at the office — for e-commerce purchases.
Consumer Technology Is Alive and Well
Five reasons for why consumer doesn't need a platform shift to thrive in the 2020s.
The string of IPO filings last week from consumer technology companies — Affirm , Airbnb , DoorDash , Roblox , and Wish — got me thinking about a question I’ve fielded frequently over the past five years:
Not only has it built a highly engaged and fast growing social network in the age of Facebook and others, but it’s also enabled users to become businesses generating millions in annual revenue through building games on the platform.
In 2020, no one said, come by our booth
Other startups like Chorus and Gong have taken a sales-driven approach to Conversational AI by listening to customer interactions and extracting the info that would help sales and marketing, such as what are the most common pain points that people have expressed?
Strategic metrics help marketers make educated decisions on allocating resources and what initiatives to prioritize, such as account engagement, pipeline velocity, and close rate.
Trendslates is a free daily email covering trends in commerce, media, and marketing.
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