In 2003, neuroscientist Read Montague added an FMRI twist to the Pepsi Challenge. In a standard blind taste test, the brain region associated with seeking reward was highly active, and Pepsi still came out on top. But things changed when volunteers were told what they were drinking. This time, Coke was the clear winner, and the area of the brain associated with thinking processes lit up. In other words, the expectation of drinking Coke made it more enjoyable.
Business & Brands
Quorn initially targeted their products at vegetarians and vegans. After all, who else would want to buy plant-based meals? But they soon discovered that these meals also appealed to health conscious non-vegans. This insight led Quorn to rebrand as a ‘healthy food’ company, famously partnering with openly meat-eating Mo Farah, and helped them massively expand their buyer base (and sales).
Getir was valued at £9 billion in early 2022 – one of the many rapid delivery apps that thrived off pandemic restrictions. But two years later it exited the UK market, after the return to physical shopping meant it struggled to turn a profit (especially with competition from existing takeaway apps like Deliveroo).
When Dietrich Mateschitz visited Thailand in 1982, he discovered Krating Daeng: a locally sourced drink that helped to cure his jet lag. He was so impressed that he decided to adapt it for a western audience: Red Bull.
Jennifer Fleiss, co-founder of Rent the Runway, had no background in fashion. But she says that “being naive is one of the best secrets of first time entrepreneurship. So we were naive enough to reach out to Diane von Furstenberg and to ask her advice and her time.” The meeting gave Fleiss important pointers for shaping the business.
Michael O’Leary removed the add-ons that make flying pleasurable. Ryanair routinely ranks bottom in airline surveys. Its social media is full of complaints about cancelled flights and extra baggage fees. But it’s a ruthless provider of low fares and high punctuality, and Europe’s most profitable airline.
Shein sells clothes for every need and occasion, but it was originally a portal to buy wedding dresses; branching out into womenswear in the early 2010s and to all types of fashion a few years later.
In the early days, Southwest Airlines had to sell one of their planes or face bankruptcy. Noticing that the average gate turnaround time was about 60 minutes, they would be able to fly all their current routes with one less plane they if they could shrink their gate turnaround time from 60 minutes to 10 minutes. So they developed a radical new boarding process with no assigned seating, and in doing so revolutionised the airline industry.
Despite having one of the speediest boarding processes in the industry, Southwest are employing a range of tricks to make it just five minutes faster; installing a colour-coded carpet that shows where different boarding groups should line up, and playing fast paced music in the jet bridge to hurry passengers up.
Specsavers makes £4 billion each year, but the founder still spends time writing birthday cards for employees. As she says, “it’s caring for the people that are at the sharp end, working really hard every day, to make sure that nobody falls through the net.”
We might associate Spotify with music, but the company describes itself as a “seamless one-stop destination for all things audio.” This has given it licence to expand into podcasts and audiobooks, both of which are growing at double digits YoY.
Spotify pays artists based on the number of streams they receive, which only counts if someone listens to 30 seconds of a song. As a result, artists are incentivised to pack albums full of short songs, all of which hint at the chorus in the opening few seconds, as opposed to longer experimental songs that take a long time to build.
Comparing claimed Spotify usage vs actual usage, one quarter of those who claim to use it monthly do not use it at all.
Only 2% of Spotify artists earn more than $1k a year.
In the early days of Spotify, users complained that the shuffle feature wasn’t random: how could two songs from the same artist play back to back? In reality the issue was a misunderstanding of chance, so Spotify actually made the feature less random to make it seem more random.