Gone are the days when luxury bags flaunt a giant logo. The Row is one of the trendsetting brands that, according to the founders, shows how something made “beautifully, in great fabric, with good fit, can sell without a logo or a name on it.”
Business & Brands
Rolls Royce reported a £5.4 billion loss in the first half of 2020. Like many luxury car brands, the pandemic had wiped out demand – but it proved to be temporary. In 2023 it delivered more cars than any other year in its history, and its share price was up by 150% compared to before the pandemic.
It wasn’t fancy technology that resulted in £300 million lost profit for M&S. As CEO Stuart Machin bluntly told reporters, it was “human error.” Attackers used social engineering to trick helpdesk staff into handing over access: they rang support desks posing as internal IT, obtained credentials or password resets, and then infiltrated the M&S network.
The world’s largest hotel corporation owns very few hotels. Instead, Marriott makes money by selling its brand to franchisees, who then set up Marriot branded hotels and pay an annual fee in return.
McDonald’s is essentially a real estate company, making billions in rent from franchised restaurants.
The need for speed led the McDonald brothers to turn to Henry Ford and the world of cars. If Ford could use a specialised system to build a car in two hours, the McDonald brothers could use it to make a burger in less than a minute. They created a new dispenser that squirted the same amount of ketchup every time, and they replaced the silverware with paper wrappings to remove the need for a big dishwasher. The resulting ‘speedee system’ became the basis for modern day fast food as we know it.
Monopoly released a new ‘simplified’ version of the game, where a mobile app handles all transactions and removes the need for a banker or physical money. Sure, players will find it easier to pay, and harder to cheat, but in the words of one journalist: “it is nowhere near as tantalising as the prospect of flaunting piles of pink and orange notes in a delicious victory over your competitive mother.” Plus, as any regular player will know, a bit of fraud is part of the fun.
Every penny counts for supermarkets. So Morrisons has recently increased the temperature of its freezers from -18°C to -15°C, after a previous trial suggested the move would save 10% on energy costs.
Nescafé has expanded its customer base by venturing into ice cream and iced drinks – a new way of staying relevant when less than half the global population buys instant coffee.
Netflix now charges £4.99 a month for weekly shows with ad breaks. Sound familiar?
Reed Hastings, with no prior experience of the film and television industry, applied the gym-model of subscription to movie rentals to create Netflix.
Reed Hastings decided to start Netflix after being fined $40 at a Blockbuster store for being late to return a copy of Apollo 13.
Netflix shows are not made equal. As the company’s recent viewing report states, “the top 1 percent of titles accounted for about 22.32 billion hours of viewing, almost 24 percent of the total. The top 10 percent brought in 68 percent of all viewing – 64.16 billion hours.”
NYT is now a gaming company – users spend more time playing games (like Wordle) than reading news.
The NYT’s purchase of Wordle, as Shane O Leary puts it, had a “rising tide lifts all boats effect on their gaming vertical.” It brought in tens of millions of people to the app and doubled the number of weekly users for non Wordle games.