Retail
An article in the New York Times raises a red flag about the music industry: could digital music sales not be nearly enough to replace ever-decreasing CD revenues? This reminded us of Chris Anderson’s 2006 classic book “The Long Tail”. What if the long tail just isn’t long enough to save some industries?
Consider this: you’ve built a diverse, intelligent, hard-working team that successfully leverages individual abilities and skill sets into a higher collective intelligence. Then the same group of people have lunch in the nearby shopping mall and do dumb things (such as spending more on a “premium” brand) because they’re in a group… Gotta love us humans. Inside we highlight two articles on the good and bad of group “intelligence”.
We’ve discussed the Netflix challenge in detail at Buysiders.com, and the “analytics”/ “data capturing and processing” theme is very important in our research. But we hadn’t posted about examples in Brazil! This Exame magazine article (in portuguese) solves this and mentions a few companies, including Saraiva. As people may guess even before reading the article, yes, the people behind this Brazilian “recommendation software” company did participate in the original Netflix contest.
A long interview with two IP partners (in Portuguese – we’re having it translated and will post it here), Cristiano Fonseca Filho and Fred Trigueiro. The talk was very informal and spanned IP’s pioneering story in the Brazilian financial market. It gives insight into how we apply some of the most important aspects of our [...]
Quick tidbits inside from e-bit’s report about the state of the Brazilian e-commerce market in 2009 – Webshoppers, 21st edition (in portuguese and in PDF). We will discuss one company’s specific performance in regards to these numbers in our upcoming Q1 2010 report, but we wanted to highlight a few general data points in advance.
John Mackey, CEO of high-end grocery chain Whole Foods, was recently profiled in the New Yorker mag. Habits and idiosyncrasies aside – he is known for putting his “personal foot in his professional mouth” – the guy is not what one would expect: he’s a libertarian capitalist at heart and digs Ayn Rand. Very importantly, it goes to show that “doing the right thing” as a corporation and earning profits – the more, the better – are far from incompatible.
Netflix is one of the most admirable cases around on corporate strategy AND execution. It shows how you can make billions out of simple things. That said, they have to kill a lion a year to stay ahead. Investment-wise, we never got to the point where we felt we knew enough to invest in them – and don’t regret not doing it.
Read more about Netflix doing the right things at the right time
The Netflix Prize has been awarded and it’s a great example of crowdsourcing. But is such “open collaboration” a tool for every situation? How open do you really want to be? Some are looking at his and saying “hold your horses”. That’s always good advice in our book.
