The China playbook: go from bottom to top in a matter of years.
All Threads
Despite being known by 95% of consumers, Chips Ahoy! is only found in 30% of U.S. households. So the brand has recently launched several innovations to appeal to a wider customer base, including Baked Bits (on-the-go snacking), more products under $3, and better for you products like gluten-free Chips Ahoy!
To overtake Johnnie Walker as market leader, Chivas Regal simply acted like market leader; putting the price up, and creating ads that didn’t show the pack (because no.1 is always recognisable).
How do you turn an unknown yogurt brand into a $3 billion revenue business? Give it mass distribution. According to Chobani’s founder Hamdi Ulukaya, “the single most important decision we made” was insisting the product be sold in mainstream grocery stores rather than specialty stores, and that it be stocked in the dairy aisle not the gourmet food aisles.
Sending Christmas cards is a dying tradition, but it’s being kept alive by the social media generation. In a 2024 survey, under 35s were most likely to send at least one card, and the majority planned to send more than in the previous year.
Bang and the dirt is gone.
Citigroup accidentally credited a client account with $81 trillion instead of $280. The system requires employees to manually enter the transaction, but (bizarrely) the amount field comes pre-populated with 15 zeros – which the employee forgot to delete. Thankfully the error was quickly spotted and rectified, not that Citigroup could afford that payment anyway.
Arguably the greatest film of all time was made by a 26 year old with no filmmaking experience. Orson Wells broke new ground with Citizen Kane, rejecting the traditional chronological narrative that was a staple in Hollywood. His secret? “Sheer dumbness… I was doing things only a beginner could be ignorant enough to do.”
Clicks aren’t a good proxy for brand results. There is no significant correlation between click-thru rate (CTR) and any brand effect metrics, such as ad recall, brand awareness or purchase intent.
Robert Woodruff, Coca Cola’s leading 20th century figure, understood the importance of good placement; promising to put Coke’s products “within arm’s reach of desire.” And he succeeded: today you can count the places it’s not sold on one hand.
Coca Cola doesn’t really sell soft drinks: it sells licensing to other companies who then manufacture and distribute Coca Cola.
Coca Cola is enjoyed in over 200 countries, and is available in the most remote places. Its presence is so universal that the former Zambian Health Minister complained that his country’s small villages stocked the brand but not lifesaving medicines.
The company did start using Santa in advertising in 1933. But Santa had been portrayed almost exclusively in red from the early 19th century and most of his modern image was put together by cartoonist Thomas Nast in the 1870s. In fact White Rock beverages had used Santa to advertise its ginger ale in 1923.
The coffee craze is nothing new. In 1739, there were three times more coffee shops per person in London than there are today.
The US News & World Report started to rank colleges based on a range of factors like acceptance rates and class sizes. But colleges quickly started to game the system; aggressively recruiting (and rejecting) candidates to appear more selective, and capping class sizes below the stated suitable amount.