business

  • Archetypal brands are classless, ageless, and regionless, and their deep meaning must be inviolate. That’s why it matters that the brand’s story (not just its advertising, but the whole myth or legend surrounding the brand) must be congruent with the brand’s core archetype.

    Brands are trusted to the degree that everything they do is consistent. Products seem right when everything about them is aligned with their informing archetype. This obviously includes the product’s logo, tag line, product design, packaging, and placement in stores, as well as the design of the story, the environment surrounding the sale of the product, and the look and story line of all promotional materials, including your Web site. They all should tell your story.

    — The Hero and the Outlaw: Building Extraordinary Brands Through the Power of Archetypes by Margaret Mark, Carol S. Pearson

  • Product-Led Growth (PLG)

    Go-to-market strategy that relies on the product to acquire, activate, or retain customers. It is seen as one of the more cost-effective ways to create a customer base, in particular to engender organic growth and evangelism. It’s particularly popular for developer tools, as it’s always presumed developers like to try something before they believe it will work for them, as well as consumer-facing companies.

    In B2B companies, it can mean using product data to drive sales actions. The idea with PLG is that people like the product so much, they use it with others, which grows the number of users organically or vastly simplifies the sales process.

    — Loved: How to Rethink Marketing for Tech Products (Silicon Valley Product Group) by Martina Lauchengco

  • If we define the future as a time that looks different from the present, then most people aren’t expecting any future at all; instead, they expect coming decades to bring more globalization, convergence, and sameness.

    In this scenario, poorer countries will catch up to richer countries, and the world as a whole will reach an economic plateau. But even if a truly globalized plateau were possible, could it last? In the best case, economic competition would be more intense than ever before for every single person and firm on the planet. However, when you add competition to consume scarce resources, it’s hard to see how a global plateau could last indefinitely. Without new technology to relieve competitive pressures, stagnation is likely to erupt into conflict. In case of conflict on a global scale, stagnation collapses into extinction.

    That leaves the fourth scenario, in which we create new technology to make a much better future. The most dramatic version of this outcome is called the Singularity, an attempt to name the imagined result of new technologies so powerful as to transcend the current limits of our understanding.

    — Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel, Blake Masters

  • The way you break through to the mainstream is to target a niche instead of a huge market. With a niche, you can segment off a chunk of the mainstream, and create an ideavirus so focused that it overwhelms that small slice of the market that really and truly will respond to what you sell.

    The early adopters in this market niche are more eager to hear what you have to say. The sneezers in this market niche are more likely to talk about your product. And best of all, the market is small enough that a few sneezers can get you to the critical mass you need to create an ideavirus.

    — Purple Cow, New Edition: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable by Seth Godin

  • There are three points of executive leverage in strategy making. The first is to manage the cost structure, or values of the organization, so that orders of disruptive products from ideal customers can be prioritized. The second is discovery-driven planning — a disciplined process that accelerates learning what will and won’t work. The third is to vigilantly ensure that deliberate and emergent strategy processes are being followed in the appropriate circumstances for each business in the corporation.

    This is a challenge that few executives have mastered, and is one of the most important contributors to innovative failure in established companies.

    — The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth by Clayton M. Christensen

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