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.
Business & Brands
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.
Nike started out as a running shoe manufacturer, long before it ventured into casual shoes and apparel. As co-founder Phil Knight explains, “we just tried to get our shoes on the feet of runners… we thought the world stopped and started in the lab and everything revolved around the product.”
When the brand pursued a DTC model, and ended hundreds of long term partnerships with retailers, it quickly realised the importance of mass distribution: many light buyers couldn’t find Nike products in their usual stores and simply didn’t buy them. Sales declined 8% in 2024.
Nurofen contains exactly the same chemical as ibuprofen, but can be seven times as expensive. When it comes to pain relief, we assume expensive products must be better.
In a quest to dominate the US market, Oatly sent representatives to high-end coffee shops to share the product with local baristas. The baristas, effectively controlling distribution, would then recommend and their oat milk with customers.
And yet, as Grace Kite shows, campaign ROI is highest when 40-50% of the budget is spent online. Just because they’re unconventional, it doesn’t mean they’re ineffective.
OnlyFans pays out $7 billion to its content creators, but the split is far from even. The top 1% of accounts make 33% of all the money and the top 10% of accounts make 73%.
According to John Foley, then CEO of Peloton, “in the very, very early days, we charged $1,200 for the Peloton bike for the first couple of months. And what turned out happening is we heard from customers that the bike must be poorly built if you’re charging $1,200 for it. We charged $2,000 dollars for it, and sales increased, because people said, ‘Oh, it must be a quality bike.’”
The meteoric rise of Peloton suggested gyms were a thing of the past. Why travel to exercise when you could do it in your living room? Yet the company’s share price remains 97% below its 2020 peak, and it has recently started renting bikes to help shore up its losses.