Tyler Perry's Empire, Tito's Vodka Teardown, Adidas Advertising Over investment, Pricing Niche Products, Celebrity Retailers, Start Your Own VC Fund, Venmo Credit Card, Older Women Ignored by Beauty
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How Tyler Perry Built a Customer-Centric Empire - Trapital by Dan Runcie
The Atlanta mogul is rightfully praised for his high volume, low-cost model, but his focus on customer experience made the difference.
When Diary of a Mad Black Woman hit theaters in 2005, Perry already had a reliable distribution channel to inform fans about his feature film.
This is a critique that Mona Scott Young, the producer of Love & Hip-Hop, also receives for her drama-induced portrayal of black celebrities in her reality series.
How ‘Handmade’ Is America’s Most Popular Vodka?
Tito’s Handmade Vodka proudly cultivates an artisanal, small-batch brand image, even as it’s recently claimed the mantle of America’s best-selling spirit
The brand, which calls itself “America’s Original Craft Vodka,” recently replaced Jack Daniel’s as the country’s top-selling spirit , with nearly $190 million in sales, making it the most statistically predictable thing you could possibly drink .
Few know what actually goes on behind the doors at Tito’s Mockingbird Distillery — when Forbes visited in 2013, its photographer was directed “away from massive buildings containing ten floor-to-ceiling stills” — and the company is famously tight-lipped about its production process beyond what’s on its labels or website, like that its vodka is distilled from corn.
The Information will launch Ticker, a tech news app that costs $29 per year – TechCrunch
Since it was founded by journalist Jessica Lessin in 2013, The Information has stood out in the tech news landscape for its focus on an ad-free, subscription-driven business model (a focus that seems increasingly prescient). Now, the upcoming launch of an app called Ticker suggests that the company…
Apparently the app was inspired by the Briefing section of The Information website, which offers quick summaries (often drawn from reporting by other publications) of major tech news.
Ticker, meanwhile, will include a section called Today with summaries of the day’s tech headlines — similar to Briefing, but written for a consumer audience.
Adidas: We over-invested in digital advertising
Adidas admits that a focus on efficiency rather than effectiveness led it to over-focus on ROI and over-invest in performance and digital at the expense of brand building.
Under a new marketing playbook – dubbed ‘Creating the new’ – and a renewed focus on generating brand desire, Adidas introduced a new campaign framework with emotional, brand-driving activity at the centre.
What the econometrics told Adidas was that it should invest in video, which hadn’t shown up before because it didn’t do well in last-click attribution, as well as TV, outdoor and cinema to drive ecommerce.
Pricing niche products: Why sell a mechanical keyboard kit for $1,668?
I recently visited a friend who runs Keycult, a business that designs and sells $500 keyboard kits.
This market consists of folks who hang out in online forums like r/MechanicalKeyboards , Deskthority , and GeekHack , where they swap keyboard photos, trade rare boards and keycap sets, and record videos about (I’m not joking here) how to install space bars backwards and lubricate switches to improve key-feel.
They hype up a “group buy” to collect enough money for a production run with a Chinese contract manufacturer (the keyboards are typically CNC-machined aluminum with custom circuit boards, so unit costs work out much better when ordering 20+ parts).
Lady Gaga, Rihanna and the Kardashians: The rise of celebrity retailers
While businesses have often seen other stores as their biggest rivals, the rich and famous are a force to be reckoned with.
While Victoria's Secret's future appears rocky at best , the lingerie market is in the middle of a massive awakening that aims to accept a wide variety of body types, races and genders, with Savage x Fenty playing a key part.
"I've been looking for an opportunity to expand my tech investment portfolio to Europe and seeing the way Klarna operates and how they challenge the status quo, I think it's a match made in heaven," Snoop Dogg said in a statement at the time .
The pitch is an early version of the deck that closed Marc Andreessen, Zoom CEO Eric Yuan and Silicon Valley investors and executives at Dropbox, Slack and other 🚀companies.
Skills alignment: The ability to partner with founders where I can immediately add value through operating experience, network and general interests was a core driver for not joining a firm.
Venmo to launch its first credit card in 2020 – TechCrunch
Venmo announced today its plans to launch its first-ever credit card. The card is being issued in partnership with Synchrony, already the issuer behind Venmo parent company PayPal’s Extras Mastercard and Cashback Mastercard. The move is meant to help Venmo, a still unprofitable arm of PayPal&…
PayPal’s plans in this space were reported in April of this year by The WSJ , which said the company had been taking meetings with various banks since late 2018 to discuss a Venmo-branded credit card.
The company also offers a Mastercard-branded debit card, launched in July 2018, which lets users tap into their Venmo account balance out in the real world, where you can’t pay digitally.
Wherein our columnist gives up on shopping and lets Amazon’s Personal Shopper dress her for fall. The algorithm is not a singular being that judges — Amazon says it uses “a combination of technology innovation and a personalized human touch to curate items for you based on the information provided in your Style Profile” — though I tend to anthropomorphize it.
Personal Shopper is Amazon’s version of Stitch Fix, designed to make shopping easier (in my opinion, dangerously thoughtless), but also to collect your data and generate recurring revenue outside of fickle trend fluctuations.
Older US women are feeling sidelined by beauty brands
As the cosmetics industry scrambles to appeal to younger consumers, a new study has found that both boomer and Gen-X women feel ignored by the current product offerings and marketing campaigns of most beauty brands.
As the cosmetics industry scrambles to appeal to younger millennial and Gen-Z consumers, a new study has found that both boomer and Gen-X women in the U.S. feel ignored by the current product offerings and marketing campaigns of most beauty brands.
This kind of strategic shift makes even more sense when one considers that, according to AARP, U.S. women aged 50 and over spend an average of $29 a month on beauty and personal grooming, representing an annual total of around $22 billion in sales.
Airbnb's quarterly loss reportedly doubled in Q1, a bad sign as investors grow wary of money-losers
Last month, The Wall Street Journal reported Airbnb saw strong growth in total booking value during the first quarter, which could help it lure additional investors.
Additionally, Airbnb that it had reached its second straight year of profitability, based on an EBITDA basis, and saw a notable uptick in guest arrivals, which could point toward rapidly accelerating growth.
GoFundMe has made its name primarily as a platform for individuals to create fundraisers for personal causes — a service that has seen hundreds of campaigns go viral through social media to raise collectively well over $5 billion in funding to date. Now, the startup is taking the next step in…
GoFundMe has made its name primarily as a platform for individuals to create fundraisers for personal causes — a service that has seen hundreds of campaigns go viral through social media to raise collectively well over $5 billion in funding to date.
GoFundMe has never disclosed much on the financial front — it has only ever had one round of funding, of an undisclosed amount, from a group of investors that included Accel, Greylock, TCV, Iconic, Meritech and Stripes.
Dynamic Ads, previously reported on by Business Insider, let advertisers automatically create ads from their catalogs.
Such ads already exist on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, and the new format is a way for Snapchat to make a bigger effort to grow retail, e-commerce and performance marketing dollars, sources previously told Business Insider.
These reps frequently offer tips and credit to try out new formats, DTC brands like Curology have told Business Insider.
Small retailers are prioritizing Amazon as search ads continue to grow | Modern Retail
Amazon’s search ad marketshare is growing, and it means brands are more clearly seeing an opportunity to use the platform’s offerings. Smaller brands particularly are re-strategizing their advertising…
For example, keeping with coconut water brands, Harmless Harvest is the number one sponsored Google result for the beverage, and the ad spot links to its Amazon storefront.
Clients now say, “I can’t possibly win at subway ads in New York City but then lose when someone looks for my brand term when they’re coming to Amazon,” he said.