Category: Strategy
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Amazon’s New Pay-With-Your-Palm Tech and its Implications
If you live in Austin and love experiencing the sharpest edge of technology, then head to the Whole Foods at Arbor Trails. There you can use a new service called Amazon One to pay for your groceries simply by putting your palm on a scanner. Here’s an excerpt from a fascinating piece in last week’s…
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Musk, Trump, Twitter, and New Media Math
It’s a good thing for the commonwealth that Elon Musk was born in South Africa; that fact bars him from seeking the U.S. presidency. Otherwise, it’s a sure bet that he’d run as a third party candidate in 2024. He’d win, too. Musk understands the media better than all but one other person. That one…
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Apple, Alaska Airlines, Taco Bell & Sweetgreen: the Trouble with Subscriptions
Two recent articles caught my eye about a new vogue for subscriptions for products that are typically transactional. The first has a misleading title: “Apple Is Working on a Hardware Subscription Service for iPhones” (Bloomberg, March 24th) is misleading because the planned service actually covers all Apple hardware software. In last Tuesday’s episode of The…
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Why Amazon Will Buy Starbucks
I’m not usually one for predictions with due dates. I see the trends, where the dominos are falling, but spotting precisely when a trend will happen is harder. This time, though, I’ll go out on a limb because two events this week have combined to make me think that Amazon will buy Starbucks within the…
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Anti-Vaxxers and the Arts of Persuasion
People decide with their hearts and then later justify those decisions with their heads. Once you accept this, then how you approach communications changes because all communication is about persuasion in one way or another. Learning simply to ask the question, “where is the heart in this?” can be powerful, although it can also be…
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Secret Stories: Microsoft, Activision, Spotify, Joe Rogan, Neil Young, Facebook
When a big business story hits I try to ask myself, “what else is going on?” When Amazon bought Whole Foods in 2017, for example, the obvious story was that the ecommerce giant wanted to tap into the nearly $800B annual U.S. grocery business. Less obvious was that by buying Whole Foods Amazon also acquired…
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Amazon’s Secret Strategy with its new Department Stores
Amazon never does things for only the obvious reasons, which makes me wonder what the company is up to with its latest retail foray: department stores. Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported: The new retail spaces will be around 30,000 square feet, smaller than most department stores, which typically occupy about 100,000 square feet,…